Don't Back Down

I've always loved puzzles. In third grade, I solved a puzzle for our class by recognizing that someone had cut her paper pumpkin apart correctly, but then colored the wrong side of one piece, and was trying to fit it into the reassembled pumpkin in that way. Flipped it over and it worked. The teacher even bought me a regular jigsaw puzzle to celebrate. Well, it was actually for the class - but I got to do it first.

Thanks to Boing Boing, I found a way to relive my youth. The No-Off puzzle on the web is modeled after one of those sliding tile puzzles, but this one adds a twist: A double-sized block that doesn't slide in every direction. Well, it's also a twist in that it's online and not a cheap little plastic piece of junk that will break in ten minutes. But the double-wide makes it even more twisted.

In case you missed that thinly-veiled hint: The double block does slide. Just not in every direction. This is important.

Anyway, the first try I managed to move about 15 blocks without ever actually doing anything. Mainly because I couldn't seem to get the function of that double-wide block. So I wandered around, found the link to other puzzles at the site, and then came back to try again.

My first "real" attempt netted a solution, but in 90 moves. Blech. Of course, 20 or so were still the effort of trying to figure out how it worked, and I felt I could do better. Then I tried again, now that I had figured it out, and managed to cut that down to 66 moves. Finally, I figured I understood the concept and what do you know? I solved the puzzle in 44 moves. Apparently this is the minimum. Sweet.