- Instant Insanity
The "Instant Insanity" puzzle consists of four cubes with faces colored with four colors (red, blue, green, and white commonly). The object of the puzzle is to stack these cubes in a column so that each side (front, back, left, and right) of the stack shows each of the four colors. The distribution of colors on each cube is unique.
This problem has a graph-theoretic solution in which a graph with four vertices labeled B, G, R, W (for blue, green, red, and white) can be used to represent each cube; there is an edge between two vertices if the two colors are on the opposite sides of the cube, and a loop at a vertex if the opposite sides have the same color. Trial and error is a slow way to solve this problem, as there are 41,472 arrangements of the four cubes only two of which are solutions. A generalized version of the puzzle with more than four cubes is
NP-complete . [citation|first1=M. R.|last1=Garey|first2=D. S.|last2=Johnson|title=Computers and Intractibility: a guide to the theory of NP-completeness|publisher=W.H. Freeman|year=1979|pages=258 (problem GP15); ] [citation|first1=E.|last1=Robertson|first2=I.|last2=Munro|title=NP-completeness, puzzles, and games|journal=Util. Math.|volume=13|year=1978|pages=99–116.]The puzzle was created by Franz Owen Armbruster, also known as
Frank Armbruster and published byParker Brothers in 1967. Over 12 million puzzles were sold. The puzzle has similarities to a much older puzzle known as "The Great Tantalizer" and derives from a set of 30 cubes devised byPercy Alexander MacMahon .References
*citation|last=Slocum|last2=Baterman|title=Puzzles Old and New|isbn=0-295-96579-7|page=38|publisher=University of Washington Press|place=Seattle
External links
* http://www.dean.usma.edu/math/people/rickey/hm/Teaching%20Instant%20Insanity.htm
* http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_8_9_99.html
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