From walts@federal.unisys.com Thu Dec 14 10:23:10 1995 Return-Path: Received: from www.han.federal.unisys.com by life.ai.mit.edu (4.1/AI-4.10) for /com/archive/cube-lovers id AA15946; Thu, 14 Dec 95 10:23:10 EST Received: from homer.MCLN.Federal.Unisys.COM by www.han.federal.unisys.com (8.6.12/mls/8.0) id KAA05464; Thu, 14 Dec 1995 10:23:08 -0500 Received: from h3-91.MCLN.Federal.Unisys.COM by homer.MCLN.Federal.Unisys.COM (8.6.12/mls/4.1) id KAA05516; Thu, 14 Dec 1995 10:25:26 -0500 Message-Id: <199512141525.KAA05516@homer.MCLN.Federal.Unisys.COM> Date: Thu, 14 Dec 95 10:25:01 -0800 From: "Walter P. Smith" Organization: Installation Services X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.22 (Windows; I; 16bit) Mime-Version: 1.0 To: Cube-Lovers@ai.mit.edu Subject: Twist Torus Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 In Sept. 1992 Mark Longridge described an idea he had for a puzzle. He called it a Twist Torus. Well I bought a puzzle that fits his description very closely. I would have sent this in sooner except that I am new to Cube Lovers. I bought mine several years ago. Did he get his design into production or was it independently invented or did someone implement Mark's idea? Will we ever know? I bought mine in a department store (cant remember which) toy department. It was not in any packaging and cost less than $2 US.. They only had one. It was quite by chance that I determined that it is a puzzle. It will test my ability to describe it in words but here goes. It is torus shaped (dough nut shaped). At first glance it looks like a bracelet. It has one slice made the same way a bagel is sliced. The puzzle can turn along this cut. There are eight differently colored sections separated by fixed black sections around the circumference of the torus. Each colored section is subdivided into 4 sub-segments that can turn at right angles to the main circumference. As a segment is turned, different parts of the segment are brought to the other side of the main cut. It operates smoothly and is brightly colored. It is fairly easy to solve but the geometry is novel and interesting. Does anyone else have one of these? Does anyone know who manufactured this? Does anyone know what it is called? Walt "The Puzzler" Smith