Giant Pyramid Solver
This is a repository for the solver and the solution for the Giant Pyramid puzzle
I bought mine around 2000. As of 2017 it is no longer sold. There is some description of the puzzle on this page: http://www.gamepuzzles.com/giantpyr.htm The author of the puzzle claims that there is only one solution. In fact there are 2 solutions that are mirror images of each other. I emailed him about it and he claimed that the mirror images do not count as they are the same. Think about that next time you want to put a left glove on your right hand.
The Giant Pyramid is a tetrahedron composed of 35 balls, 5 balls to a side. It is assembled from 9 pieces of 6 different kinds (4 pieces are the same). 8 pieces are made of 4 balls and 1 piece is made of 3 balls. The goal of the puzzle to put the pieces together to form a perfect tetrahedron.
The 9 pieces:
A few pieces on the base (not necessarily in place):
The text on the back of the base:
Pyramid layers with position labels
0 1 5 2 6 9 3 7 10 12 4 8 11 13 14 15 16 19 17 20 22 18 21 23 24 25 26 28 27 29 30 31 32 33 34
Piece labels
- 3-ball
- piece with a 60-degree arm
- piece with the triangle
- trans-piece
- cis-piece
- the piece with 90-degree bend
- Same as 6
- Same as 6
- Same as 6
Positions of the pices in the solved puzzle:
Piece id: 1 1 1 4 3 6 7 4 3 2 7 8 2 7 2 6 6 6 3 2 4 9 4 8 7 5 5 3 8 9 8 9 5 9 5 Index: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4
1 0,1,2 2 9,12,14,19 3 4,8,18,27 4 3,7,20,22 5 25,26,32,34 6 5,15,16,17 7 6,10,13,24 8 11,23,28,30 9 21,29,31,33
Solved puzzle
Solver
The brute force solver would have to check 883,702,234,255,196,160 (or 8.8E17 positions). Intruducing a basic constraint - if a combination of piece positions already has a clash where two balls occupy the same space, then no further checking will be done on this combination - pares down this number to 52.6 million. This number can be searched on a modern MacBook Pro laptop in 3.06 seconds.