Nightmare on 'Truncated Ball Pyramid' Street (IPP36) by Markus Gotz

Nightmare on 'Truncated Ball Pyramid' Street (IPP36) by Markus Gotz

Designed, produced and exchanged by Markus at IPP 36 in Kyoto.

Assemble the seven puzzle pieces into a truncated ball pyramid (=tetrahedron ball pyramid with 5 balls at its longest edges, but without the four corner balls)

Markus wrote "The idea of this puzzle is to create a ball assembly by using links of length 1 (from center to center of a ball) as well as of length √2 (by using a „longer connection"). This concept is not new - in fact according to my recordings I did several sketches and tries of a truncated ball tetrahedron in 2002, but at that time it only was done on paper. No physical model has been made. And so I did not know if the arrangement of pieces can be disassembled or not. This was an open question at that time. In 2016 I made a prototype and it turned out that unfortunately the pieces cannot be disassembled!

Nevertheless, I thought that the idea is quite good and has potential for maybe finding a working puzzle. And so I sat down again and started to draw several new sketches... and finally found another nice assembly. And again, I was not sure if this assembly can be completely disassembled. A new prototype was built, and this time the arrangement successfully could be disassembled into the seven puzzle pieces.

During the design process several restrictions and requirements for the pieces and the puzzle have been taken in to account:

Each piece has at least one „longer connection" (final number of „longer connections" per piece: 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2)

The pieces should have about the same number of balls (final number of balls per piece: 5, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 4)

I wanted each piece to be a „snake-piece" (i.e. there is no ball with more than 2 connections to other balls)

There should be 10 „long connections" (this is the maximum number the puzzle can have)

All pieces have to be different  And finally: The puzzle should able to be taken apart (this is not obvious at all)

Have fun with this quite challenging puzzle."

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