Hutton Honors College
— 11-10-06
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A Solution to Every Puzzle?An HHC "Hand-on" Afternoon with the Slocum Puzzle
Collection IU's Lilly Library has recently received a gift of more than 30,000 puzzles and nearly 4,000 puzzle-related books from long-time collector Jerry Slocum. If you have ever been confounded by a puzzle or thrilled to solve one, you will find many different kinds of puzzles to challenge you in the Slocum Collection of Mechanical Puzzles, Brainteasers, and Ingenious Objects, including put-together, take-apart, interlocking, disentaglement, sequential movement, dexterity, vessel, vanish, folding, and impossible puzzles. One sequential movement puzzle in the collection, Chinese Rings, would take 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 moves to solve the "short way." According to the Lilly, "[a]t one move per second, twenty-four hours a day, it would take 585 billion years to solve." With an introduction and talk by Lilly Director Breon Mitchell and Jillian Hinchliffe, the curatorial assistant for puzzles, you will have a chance to learn about IU's newest treasures and have a chance to test your imagination, perception, and skill with some of the "easier" puzzles in the collection. Light refreshments will be served. |
