Serendipitous Diskovery

Description

Serendipitous Diskovery is an accidental improvement of Diskussion, discovered by Mike Wood. Bothg puzzles are magnetic sequential-movement puzzle. The tokens contain 10x1-millimeter magnetic disks. There are also ten 10x1-mm disk magnets embedded in the frame. When one of the four rotors is turned such that the void goes over an embedded magnet, then the adjacent magnetic token will jump into the void. So the puzzle is played by only turning the rotors without touching the tokens. The one-way jumps of the tokens make it impossible to simply "undo" a wrong move.

When building a sample of Diskussion for himself, Mike accidentally used only 20 magnetic tokens, instead of the 23 in Diskussion. Moreover, he put some of the magnetic tokens upside down, which reverses their magnetic polarity. Both aspects make the puzzle more difficult and interesting to solve. The former causes accidental moves of disks at places where one is not paying attention. The latter causes some tokens to move in the opposite direction from others.

Mike's original prototype had many tokens with reversed polarity. Unfortunately, this may cause the puzzle getting stuck in a "black-hole state". So the new prototype has only five reverse tokens, namely the blue ones. Mike also discovered that the accidental moves encourage people to park rotors in a mid-way-state to prevent such moves. The new prototype includes a blocking mechanism at the bottom that disallows these mid-way state. Finally, Mike's prototype had a transparent cover to prevent people from cheating. The new prototype has no cover, so people can at least undo a wrong move.

Watch the YouTube video.

Please order a 3D-printed do-it-yourself puzzle kit from iMaterialise at this page (check with Oskar about screws and stickers), or contact Oskar directly if you are interested in obtaining a fully colored, stickered and assembled sample of this puzzle.