A sliding puzzle, sliding block puzzle, or sliding tile puzzle is a puzzle that challenges a player to slide usually flat pieces along certain routes (usually on a board) to establish a certain end-configuration.
The fifteen puzzle is the oldest type of sliding block puzzle. It was invented by Noyes Chapman and created a puzzle craze in 1880. Sam Loyd is often wrongly credited with making sliding puzzles popular based on his false claim that he invented the fifteen puzzle.
Unlike other tour puzzles, a sliding block puzzle prohibits lifting any piece off the board. This property separates sliding puzzles from rearrangement puzzles. Hence, finding moves and the paths opened up by each move within the two-dimensional confines of the board are important parts of solving sliding block puzzles.
Sliding puzzles are essentially two-dimensional in nature, even if the sliding is facilitated by mechanically interlinked pieces (like partially encaged marbles) or three-dimensional tokens. As this example shows, some sliding puzzles are mechanical puzzles. However, the mechanical fixtures are usually not essential to these puzzles; the parts could as well be tokens on a flat board that are moved according to certain rules.
This type of puzzle has been computerized (as puzzle video games) and is available to play for free on-line from many Web pages. It is a descendant of the jigsaw puzzle in that its point is to form a picture on-screen. The last square of the puzzle is then displayed automatically once the other pieces have been lined up.
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A solved 15-puzzle.
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A 7x7 sliding block puzzle. The task for this puzzle is to arrange it so that no tile design is repeated in any row column or diagonal. There is more than one solution to this puzzle.
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A 7x7 puzzle. This one solves to a picture, like a jigsaw puzzle.
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Inakube, an example of a 3D slider puzzle. The puzzle is unique for requiring the user to complete a 3D model contained within the cubes.
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A 3x3 sliding puzzle featuring a familiar comic book character.
Read more about Sliding Puzzle: Examples of Sliding Puzzles
Famous quotes containing the words sliding and/or puzzle:
“Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flights,
Waves in its plumes the various light.”
—Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
“Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)