Andrew Aitken

Blog

Instant insanity solver

Tue 29 January 2013 Geek c# .net

I was visiting my sister for Christmas and they had a puzzle for us to play with. It's called the Instant Insanity puzzle, or at least it was a variation of it with old comic book covers instead of plain colours like the one on Wikipedia.

Pretty much everyone had a shot but nobody could quite get all 4 cubes to have different sides. Like a true geek I decided to write some code to solve it for me.

I put a little sticker with an arrow on each cube so I could identify them and what direction was "north". This allowed me to map the cubes in code and also reverse the map when the code found a solution.

You can find the code here: GitHub

As it says in the Readme, it definitely needs refactored but it got the job done. It ran pretty much instantly and found 4 solutions (you can turn the stack 90 degrees and still have the same solution). It also finds 65,532 non solutions but I have to assume there are four of each one, making there 16,383 invalid solutions. A lot less than claimed on the box...

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