Serendipitous Diskovery

This CAD model was designed by Oskar van Deventer, copyright (c), 9 March 2024.

Serendipitous Diskovery is an accidental improvement of Diskussion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLf4cQCFMHc ), discovered by Mike Wood. Both puzzles are magnetic sequential-movement puzzle. The tokens contain 10x1-millimeter magnetic disks. There are also ten 10x1-mm disk magnets embedded in the frame. When one of the four rotors is turned such that the void goes over an embedded magnet, then the adjacent magnetic token will jump into the void. So the puzzle is played by only turning the rotors without touching the tokens. The one-way jumps of the tokens make it impossible to simply "undo" a wrong move.

When building a sample of Diskussion for himself, Mike accidentally used only 20 magnetic tokens, instead of the 23 in Diskussion. Moreover, he put some of the magnetic tokens upside down, which reverses their magnetic polarity. Both aspects make the puzzle more difficult and interesting to solve. The former causes accidental moves of disks at places where one is not paying attention. The latter causes some tokens to move in the opposite direction from others.

Mike's original prototype had many tokens with reversed polarity. Unfortunately, this may cause the puzzle getting stuck in a "black-hole state". So the new prototype has only five reverse tokens, namely the blue ones. Mike also discovered that the accidental moves encourage people to park rotors in a mid-way-state to prevent such moves. The new prototype includes a blocking mechanism at the bottom that disallows these mid-way state. Finally, Mike's prototype had a transparent cover to prevent people from cheating. The new prototype has no cover, so people can at least undo a wrong move.

The puzzle uses 30 disk magnets of this type: https://www.supermagnete.nl/eng/disc-magnets-neodymium/disc-magnet-10mm-1mm_S-10-01-N . However, we recommend to buy a whole bunch extra, as the magnets are fragile and easy to break. The sketch "Serendipitous Diskovery - magnet placement.jpg" shows their placement. The 5 blue disks have their magnets polarised such that blue disks are pushed from from the blue spinner into the yellow or green spinners. The 5 red, 5 yellow and 5 green disks have their magnets all polarised the same, and opposite to the 5 blue ones. If you can, 3D-print the bottom layers of each of the 20 disks black. This will prevent confusion at the assembly.

The 4 spinners are registered with 26 small magnets of this type: https://www.supermagnete.nl/eng/disc-magnets-neodymium/disc-magnet-3mm-2mm_S-03-02-N. Put 18 of them into the frame, and 2 in each of the 4 spinners. Make sure that they are all placed in the same direstion, such that the spinner magnets attract the frame magnets in all 6 positions.

Here are some links about this design.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7F3eHVQAvs
https://i.materialise.com/en/shop/item/serendipitous-diskovery
https://www.shapeways.com/product/2L6HGN34A/serendipitous-diskovery
https://i.materialise.com/forum/t/serendipitous-diskovery-by-oskar-mike-wood/3698
https://twistypuzzles.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39542

Feel free to 3D-print an extra sample to give to a friend, as long as you mention the designer and don't charge money.

If you are planning to sell some samples, then please contact me for a license agreement. The royalty fee is 10% of your selling price.

Please do not upload the design to a commercial service, or redistribute the design in any way other than linking to the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7F3eHVQAvs

Enjoy!

Oskar
3 August 2024, updated 12 March 2025

Contact: 
https://oskarvandeventer.nl/index_contact.php?subject=Print%20It%20Yourself


