Little stopgap post while I think of something decent to write about

It's been a little while since I last posted anything on here. Here's a nice 4-way symmetrical heptomino construction, does that make it better?

Fig. 1: Those corners are surprisingly restricting of which heptominoes can make them.

 

In the past I used to crack open the box of polyform stuff in evenings as a way of relaxing and calming down, but recently I stumbled upon this monstrosity which seems to have the opposite effect on me:

Fig. 2: Eww gross.

Called the 'sawblade' in my little notebook where I sketch out possible constructable shapes, and although its just a pure hexomino puzzle it's way harder than it has any right to be. I found the above sort of near-miss early on, which fit all the pieces but had an asymmetrical clump for a central hole which just looks wrong. I mean, even the 'proper' solution has a 2-fold symmetrical hole in the middle of an otherwise 4-fold construction so it's never going to be perfect, but this was just too imperfect to live with.

Fig. 3: Better (marginally...)

It took a further three days of trying on and off, just whenever I had half an hour or so spare until I finally stumbled on a solution that had the central hole looking some way presentable. The real nightmare pieces in solving this were the long straight bits, the I-hexomino and the various pieces with a 5xn bounding box. And the big L-shape piece. Usually these can be sat against the flat walls of rectangular constructions but not in this case... Learning to use these up early on seemed to be the key to cracking this one.

I'm toying with the idea of laser-cutting a fresh new set of hexominoes (again...) this time using transparent acrylic so I can see the boundaries between pieces. It's tempting to make a tray for them shaped like the above pattern, especially since it's approximately square so the entire tray would be relatively compact. I could maybe have the central heptomino 'hole' in a contrasting colour too. The only drawback of all this would be that every time I wanted to tidy the pieces away into the tray I'd have to go through the ordeal of solving it.

 

 29th? Yesss! didn't miss a month!