A Tangled Tale

We bought this ring and rope wooden puzzle years ago when we visited Johnson Space center at Houston. The goal of the puzzle is to move the metal ring from left at the blue ball, through a tangled rope, to the left at the yellow ball, as shown in the photo above. During that trip we also bought a mysterious toy "Space Force".

I tried a few times to solve the puzzle with no success. I also searched the internet for the solution to the puzzle, found a written instruction, still could not solve the puzzle. It has been on the top of our large bookshelf since.

Last Sunday, I happened to watch a video from science.com about solving topology related puzzles.... This video illustrated the basic approach of solving a seemingly impossible puzzle easily through topology consideration.

It aroused my interests in solving the rope and ring wooden puzzle on top of my bookshelf.

So I looked at the puzzle again...

Through Google lens, I found that the wooden puzzle is named tangled tale wooden puzzle. I also found a Youtube video to show how to solve it.

Despite watching the video to see the step by step , I couldn't follow because I did not know the goal or why the person made the moves.

I asked Lily to give it a try since she is a hands-on person. She watched, and tried a few times...finally solved it

I  watched her solving it, step by step, made good suggestions during the process.

When I tried to solve it, I  still couldn't solve it

I had a discussion with her, and figured out the specific goals and the characteristics of the key step:

1) obviously the metal ring can not pass the wooden rings

2) section of the rope can move through the wooden rings

3) so the focus is on how to make the rope move around the wooden and metal rings to provide the escape route - like the simpler puzzle shown in scoence.com video. 

Finally I moved the ring from left to right, and the did the reverse.  I could solve it consistently!

We had a great time to solve this puzzles for a couple of hours.

the ring at the start position

The ring is moved to the second position, on the rope between and 1st and 2nd wood ring

The ring is moved to the third position, on the rope between and 2nd and 3rd wood ring

puzzle solved!

Notes

For difficult/complex problems, when they are solved by others, we need to understand and practice the process to make it our own. So we can solve the problem and similar problems on our own.

Sometimes,  some impossible problems actually are possible.  but there are problems that have no solution.

One may try this site to buy the tangled tale wooden puzzle  https://www.puzzlemaster.ca/browse/wood/woodpuzzlemaster/17-tangled-tales