![]() Indeed, the Fifteen Puzzle is a useful tool for solving other math conundra. Woolsey Johnson rounded up several successful strategies, documenting various ways to get the 13, 14, and 15 to line up in the correct order by rotating the box a quarter-turn. Both pedagogical and technical journals have proffered various ways to approach it. The Fifteen Puzzle has had a long and lively afterlife as the subject of mathematical scrutiny. Anticipating reader uproar over dedicating so much space to a game, the Journal’s editors explained in their pages that they were not doing so in response to the puzzle’s popularity but because “the principle of the game has its root in what all mathematicians of the present day are aware constitutes the most subtle and characteristic conception of modern algebra, viz: the law of dichotomy applicable to the separation of the terms of every complete system of permutations into two natural and indefeasible groups.” Story demonstrated that any even permutation is possible. Johnson explained that any odd permutation-that is, one where the end placement requires an odd number of moves from the original setup-is impossible to achieve. In 1879, as the Fifteen Puzzle was exploding in popularity, the American Journal of Mathematics published a pair of articles parsing it. And the 13-15-14 starting position is one of these impossibilities. “At other times no solution could be found, no matter how long or hard one tried.” That’s because the Fifteen Puzzle taps into a central binary phenomenon of computational algebra: about 50 percent of the time, the game is easy, and the other 50 percent, it is impossible. “The major factor in the fascination with the puzzle from the beginning was that sometimes the puzzle, although a bit difficult, could be solved,” they write in The Fifteen Puzzle. Puzzle experts Jerry Slocum and Dic Sonneveld have charted the story behind this phenomenon in meticulous detail. The game seems simple enough, but solvers soon realized it was hardly as easy as it appeared to be. That is, the final row reads 13, 15, 14, blank space, and players must find a way to reverse those last two numbers. The puzzle kicks off with the squares in their natural order, except for the last two. via Wikimedia CommonsĪlthough players can start with the numbered pieces in any combination, the version of the puzzle that quickly became the most popular is also one of its most maddening iterations. Then, the player slides the numbers around, shifting them in and out of the blank space, in an attempt to move them into order, and leaving the empty slot in the bottom right corner. The container is big enough to hold sixteen such squares, leaving one position perpetually empty. Fifteen numbered blocks get placed any order in a shallow four-by-four box. Also called the Gem Puzzle, the Boss Puzzle, the Game of Fifteen, or the Magic Square, among other monikers, the Fifteen Puzzle is a mechanical game.
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