The Rush Hour set comes with 40 challenges as well as an opportunity to make your own. The most well-known is Rush Hour by ThinkFun, which has cars sliding only in straight lines on a rectangular grid, where the object is to remove the red car through an opening. Sliding block puzzles are still popular today, as there are many recent products. These puzzles could often be easy, or they could be extremely hard, requiring hundreds of moves for the smallest solution.There are even 3-dimensional sliding block puzzles, called burr puzzles, of which are sometimes easier than sliding block puzzles, but some, like Gordian’s Knot (by Thinkfun) are harder, having much more pitfalls and requiring 63 moves to complete.

Some good examples of these are Dad’s Puzzle, Get My Goat, and the Tit-Bits Teaser#4. Soon after that came sliding block puzzles with differing shapes.

Mathematicians have proved that you can only obtain half of the solutions from any starting position. Loyd’s money was safe, though, because the puzzle is impossible. The 15 Puzzle with the 14 and the 15 interchanged. Software for simulating the 15 puzzle is everywhere, and shouldn’t be too hard to find. At this point, if you have a 15 puzzle, or can make one, you should definitely try to solve this problem. (This is unlike the Rubik’s Cube, where you may need to learn lots of algorithms) The thing which sparked the puzzle craze, though, was that Sam Loyd, the famous puzzlist, offered a $1,000 dollar reward for simply interchanging the positions of the 14 and the 15, while keeping all the other pieces the same. It’s moderately hard, but easy if you know the 1 algorithm needed to solve it. In it, you would scramble up the blocks and then try to reorder them to it’s initial position. In the late 1800’s, it sparked a 15 puzzle craze which apparently “drove hundreds of people mad”. I mentioned in an earlier post the 15 Puzzle, which is one of the most famous examples of puzzles. Recently I’ve gotten interested in various sliding block puzzles (or klotski), which are sequential movement puzzles where you have to move a certain block to another position, often involving moving other blocks out of the way.

Note: Software to simulate these sliding block puzzles will be given and reviewed at the end of the post.

For windows instal My Slider Puzzle