David's TripleCross Page

TripleCross is a puzzle made by Binary Arts. Binary Arts has released two versions of the puzzle, which differ only in coloring and the marking of three of the tiles. This is the old one, and this is the new one.

The puzzle is made up of 18 tiles on three sliders. The tiles are arranged like this:

There are three sliders on the puzzle. Rows two and three are on a slider that can be in one of three positions: Left, Center and Right. The "home" position of this slider is in the center. Columns two and three and columns five and six are on two other sliders that are linked together. The home position of the left slider is the down position. When one of the vertical sliders moves down, the other moves up and vice versa.

There are four possible move combinations that start and stop with the sliders in their home positions: RUCD, LUCD, URDC and ULDC. In this notation, R, C and L refer to horizontal slider position. U and D refer to left vertical slider position.

Each of the basic moves cycles two groups of seven tiles. RUCD and URDC (which are inverses of each other) cycle (CDELRQJ,FABHONM). LUCD and ULDC (which are inverses of each other) cycle (QKDEFMR,NGABIPO). This notation labels the tiles as follows:

    AB
CDEFGHI
JKLMNOP
 QR

Here's my attempt to describe my solution. I really need some feedback about how I can make this clearer. Please let me know whether or not you can understand what I'm trying to say.

Here is a message from the Cube Lovers mailing list on how to make a program to exhaustively solve the puzzle.

Here is some source code to programs that can solve the puzzle. Here is a CGI interface to one of these programs. Here are the sequences of moves that I use to solve the puzzle.

Please send any comments about this page to davidbarr@iname.com.

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