Duplicate Puzzle Non-Tutorial

You might be thinking, "One (or two) of these things is not like the others." But actually, quite the opposite is true. In this picture are four pairs of 3D twisty puzzles, each of which is exactly the same puzzle. On the far left are the Super Ivy Cube (at front) and the Rex Cube, corner-turning puzzles that I've discussed before. They look a bit different from each other but aren't. Don't let Super Ivy's gentler curves fool you. Other than the fact that it turns more smoothly and with less propensity for locking up on you, or even shedding pieces that can only be snapped back into place through frustrating struggle, its solution is exactly the same as the Rex.

The second pair, from front to back, are the Eight Petal Cube and the Redi Cube. Unlike Rex and Super Ivy, I didn't order them knowing they were the same puzzle. I bought Eight Petal expecting it to be something else; I must not have looked very closely at the image on the website where I ordered it, or else I wasn't reasoning clearly about it. But yes, it does exactly what Redi does, only with more gracefully rounded cuts between the moving pieces. It moves very smoothly – they both do, really – but the Eight Petal Cube is smooth-turning to a fault: to the point where you have to be careful how you hold it or you'll turn it by accident, and where turning it just the way you intend can be tricky when it's trying to turn two or three different ways at once.

Second from the right, at front, is the good ol' 2-Cube, a.k.a. Rubik's Mini Cube. Hard to believe, but that strange object behind it, called the Magic Eye Cube more because of its eye motif than for any actual resemblance to a cube, is essentially the same puzzle. When it arrived last week or so, I was flummoxed for a minute before I could work out how the pieces were supposed to move. I actually pulled up a video tutorial and only had to watch about 5 seconds of it before I realized what my problem was: Magic Eye's corners are inverted. Concave. So that bit of cube facing forward in the picture is actually the same green, orange and white corner as the top front corner of the 2x2x2 next to it. Once you realize that it's flipped inside out like an optical illusion of a cube where the corners poke inward instead of outward, solving it exactly like a 2-Cube becomes possible. And oddly satisfying, with the guts exposed to view. Except when the layers lock up, which they do if you try to twist it while everything isn't perfectly aligned.

Finally, yes, we have a banana. I couldn't resist. And I've scrambled it and solved it, so I can verify that it scrambles and solves exactly like the 223 cuboid at front right. A few of the pieces (especially the corner pieces at the back of the banana) are similar in size and shape, but not so similar that you can't tell when they're not in the right place. Transferring the cuboid concept into banana form does generate some shape-changing oddness, and forces you to reason not so much from color but from the shape you're trying to restore, which piece needs to go where. But remember your algorithms. I mean, it's just two steps plus a couple of final cases, remember?

So, there are no new procedures to demonstrate this time. No tutorial necessary! And therefore, since shooting pictures of a sample solve is low-key a pain in the butt, I'm not doing it. Have a banana. Go outside and touch grass. Feed some ducks. And see you later!