Dominumbers - How can you count with magnetic e-ink?
Channel: OskarPuzzle
Date: 13/04/2024

Print it yourself at https://oskarvandeventer.nl/Print-It-Yourself/. Buy at https://i.materialise.com/en/shop/item/dominumbers or https://www.shapeways.com/product/7A39MKP22/dominumbers . Dominumbers is a pattern puzzle with magnetic marbles and a magnetic board. The object of the puzzle is to place the domino pieces such that they make numbers: 0123456789. Other challenges are +-*/:|^║=?, white and black. The puzzle is quite confusing to solve, if you don't know what you are doing. When solving systematically, one would first need to map out the magnets embedded in the board and in the seven pieces. With that knowledge, one can easily solve each challenge on paper, and then confirm with the magnetic puzzle.

The puzzle was designed by using Excel. 15 magnets are placed in the board randomly, and it counted the number of black-white (and white-black) spheres for each of the challenges. If all those numbers are equal, then the puzzle can at least be solved with monominoes. If not, then the loop is repeated. Excel found a solution quickly. Surprisingly, that solution did not only allow the ten canonical challenges 0123456789, but over ten additional challenges. So the magnet placement on the board is quite "universal". Next, I combined the 15 monominoes into 6 dominoes (two of each of the three types 00, 01, 11) and one triomino (the "V" triomino, 110). After that, I manually confirmed that each of the twenty challenges are solvable.

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