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A sliding puzzle, sliding block puzzle, or sliding tile puzzle challenges a player to slide usually flat pieces along certain routes (usually on a board) to establish a certain end-configuration.

The fifteen puzzle is a the oldest type of sliding block puzzle. Sam Loyd is often wrongly credited with making sliding puzzles popular based on his false claim that he invented the fifteen puzzle. The 15 Puzzle, invented by Noyes Chapman, created a puzzle craze in 1880. Unlike other tour puzzles, a sliding block puzzle prohibits lifting any piece off the board. This property separates sliding puzzles from rearrangement puzzles. Hence finding moves, and the paths opened up by each move, within the two-dimensional confines of the board, are important parts of solving sliding block puzzles.

Sliding puzzles are essentially two-dimensional in nature, even if the sliding is facilitated by mechanically interlinked pieces (like partially encaged marbles) or three-dimensional tokens. As this example shows, some sliding puzzles are mechanical puzzles. However, the mechanical fixtures are usually not essential to these puzzles; the parts could as well be tokens on a flat board which are moved according to certain rules.

This type of puzzle has been computerized, and is available to play for free on-line from many web pages. It is a descendant of the jigsaw puzzle in that its point is to form a picture on-screen. The last square of the puzzle is then displayed automatically once the other pieces have been lined up.

A solved 15-puzzle.

A 7x7 sliding block puzzle. The task for this puzzle is to arrange it so that no tile design is repeated in any row column or diagonal. There is more than one solution to this puzzle.

A 7x7 puzzle. This one solves to a picture, like a jigsaw puzzle.

[edit] Examples of sliding puzzles

• Fifteen puzzle
• Klotski
• Minus Cube
• Jumbly

[edit] See also

• Puzzle
• Mechanical puzzles
• Combination puzzles
• Transport Puzzle
• Rush Hour
• Rubik's Cube

[edit] References

• Sliding Piece Puzzles (by Edward Hordern, 1986, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-853204-0) is said to be the definitive volume on this type of puzzle.
• Winning Ways (by Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp et al., 1982, Academic Press)
• The 15 Puzzle (by Jerry Slocum & Dic Sonneveld, 2006, Slocum Puzzle Foundation)
• maa.org column on Sliding-block puzzles which rebuts the claims in the Economist.
• US Patent 4872682 - sliding puzzle wrapped on Rubik's Cube