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The 15 Puzzle is a square tablet containing 15 smaller square tiles labeled with the integers 1 to 15, set so that only one square may be moved at a time into the only available empty square by a move up or down or left or right (but never diagonally). The goal of the puzzle is to take a puzzle in an unsorted initial state, such as
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8 |
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1 |
| 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
| 6 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
| 12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
and set each tile in its proper order.
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2 |
3 |
4 |
| 5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
| 9 |
10 |
11 |
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| 13 |
14 |
15 |
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The puzzle was invented by Noyes Chapman, who also created a famously unsolvable version with 14 and 15 switched. His original idea was to construct a puzzle with 16 tiles that would be moved to form a magic square with 34 as its magic constant. The 15 Puzzle was initially made of wood; today they are almost always made of plastic. Darling calls it “the Rubik's cube of its day.”
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- D. Darling, ``15 Puzzle'' in The Universal Book of Mathematics: From Abracadabra To Zeno's paradoxes. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley (2004)
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"15 Puzzle" is owned by PrimeFan.
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(view preamble)
| Other names: |
Fifteen Puzzle, Game of Fifteen |
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Cross-references: magic constant, magic square, order, right, integers, square
This is version 2 of 15 Puzzle, born on 2007-02-28, modified 2007-05-25.
Object id is 9001, canonical name is 15Puzzle.
Accessed 1385 times total.
Classification:
| AMS MSC: | 91A24 (Game theory, economics, social and behavioral sciences :: Game theory :: Positional games ) | | | 00A08 (General :: General and miscellaneous specific topics :: Recreational mathematics) |
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Pending Errata and Addenda
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