Inspired by the concept of - The Ultimate Puzzle 48 puzzles rolled into 1 by Lee Willcott.

MEK ULTRA!? Is this part of some weird human experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra)? No…

Pieces can be used top side up or bottom side up, rotated in any direction. This offers exponentially more possibilities.

Solve it 2x2: easy - enjoy at your own pace or race another to see who can get the most unique solves in a period of time

Solve it 3x3: medium - record your solves, how many possibilities are there

Solve it 4x4: ULTRA - There's only one!

If you solve the 4x4, will the experiment be done? No! 1) it's not an experiment…. 2) there are 4 puzzles I will release that form MEK ULTRA COMBINED (see below)

ENJOY!!

PUZZLE SOLVE NOTATION

The pieces have arbitrary ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ designations designated by whether the direction arrow comes before the number ('bottom') or after the number ('top'). The pieces are randomly numbered 1-16 with two digits. The direction arrow can be used to indicate the piece orientation as well as ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ facing when recording solutions.

Below are some examples (I tried for no typos, but let me know if you find some and I'll update)

2x2 solve:

06↓, 09→, →02, ↑08

2x2 solve rotated clockwise:

↓02, 06←, →08, 09↓

2x2 solve flipped over:

→06, 02↓, ↓09, 08←

2x2 solve standard notation (lowest number piece in upper left corner, ‘top’ facing-arrow to the right of number):

02→, 08↓, ↑06, →09

BACKGROUND

When solving ‘The Ultimate Puzzle’, we made a bit of a mistake. My son solved it while we were messing with it on a family vacation and I thought ‘that’s weird, I thought it would be harder'. Well the place we were staying on vacation didn't have great lighting where we had the pieces sitting, and we didn't recognize that there was a front and back side to the pieces. And the intent was that you solve it with the pieces facing up. But the joining parts of the pieces were symmetrical and you could connect pieces regardless of whether they were up or not.

As I sometimes do, I wrote some software to analyze the heck out of the game. It was, in fact, much easier to solve (there were thousands of possible good solutions) when allowing the pieces to be top side up or top side down. The side of the box says 250K incorrect solutions - well if you allow using the pieces up and down then there's a heck of a lot more incorrect solutions, but also more correct solutions. In fact, it's much easier to solve the 4x4 - rather than the real 48 solutions, there are thousands.

I liked the idea of a puzzle allowing up and down, but wanted it to still be harder. So I generated the 1 solution (with position rotations and flipping 24) version of a new puzzle allowing up or down. The exponential increase in incorrect answers, but narrowing down the right solution to one.

One thing that was sometimes tough about The Ultimate Puzzle was the inward and outward arrows would sometimes get you confused - all excited for a second when you're getting close and - nope wrong arrow. So, why not make the other two sides something similar as well - I went with the top and bottom of a 5 point star. Embrace the frustration!

Finally, when generating the MEK ULTRA puzzle I wanted to add another dimension. I was able to generate several sets of 1 in a billion solution puzzles. Enough that I then analyzed the pieces of those MEK ULTRA puzzles. I found that if I rotated the joining pieces correctly and selected wisely - I could make the MEK ULTRA COMBINED puzzle.

MEK ULTRA COMBINED puzzle

I will have 4 editions of MEK ULTRA Puzzles coming out. If you can solve each one, then take the corner 4 pieces of each solution you will then have 16 (4x4) pieces which form the combined puzzle.

Notations for a solution would the include the MEK ULTRA Puzzle's edition as well as number and orientation.

example: (Circle-↓012), (Square-02←), (Triangle-01↑),…

Solve the puzzle and send me the correct solution and maybe I'll try to get you a job working with our Clinical Bioinformatics team at the Mayo Clinic helping to develop new genetic tests to save lives :). Or maybe I'll think you are a time traveler from the future using quantum computers to solve random and strange puzzles from the past and run from you like the Terminator….