Geometry and dissection
Tangram
Seven simple tans become animals, letters, proofs, and silhouettes through area-preserving rearrangement.
- Math
- Shape transformation, symmetry, area, and convexity.
- Status
- Playable workbench
Eastern Puzzle ArchiveFeatured puzzle systems
The first systems in a growing puzzle resource.
This shelf starts with Tangram, Nine Linked Rings, and Huarong Dao because they make three useful ideas easy to test: shape, sequence, and search. More old puzzle toys, mathematical games, and AI-readable systems can be added once they have enough source context to deserve a page.
Binary state and recursion
Nine Linked Rings
A mechanical sequence puzzle where progress depends on legal state changes rather than brute force.
- Math
- Binary-like states, Gray code, recursion, and move counts.
- Status
- Playable state stepper
Sliding blocks and search
Huarong Dao
A compact sliding-block system that turns a historical story shape into an algorithmic search problem.
- Math
- State-space graphs, breadth-first search, heuristics, and optimization.
- Status
- Playable board
Future systems
A public queue, not a promise list.
These candidates help keep the project expandable while keeping the published site honest. A system gets its own page only after enough source context, explanation, and interaction design are ready.
Luban Lock
An interlocking construction puzzle family where the interesting question is how pieces constrain one another in three dimensions.
Needs source review before publication; likely useful for a future construction-toy and constraint-solving track.Go
A deep board game for territory, influence, and search that connects classical play with modern AI history.
Requires careful scope decisions because the source base is large; best treated as a research candidate before any public page.AI Puzzle Lab
A workshop track for turning puzzle states into notation, legal moves, search graphs, and small explainable prototypes.
This should stay in research until each prototype has tests, limitations, and a clear explanation of what AI is and is not deciding.