Puzzle Beast
http://www.puzzlebeast.com
Grade: A+

Date reviewed: 8/13/04

If you're in the mood for some difficult - and I mean really, really difficult - visual challenges, check out Puzzle Beast. Who is Puzzle Beast? He's more machine now than man; twisted and evil. I'm just kidding - Puzzle Beast is in fact all machine, an AI construct designed by James W. Stephens for the sole purpose of designing unique and hellishly hard puzzles.

Consider the Meandering Monk Maze: on the surface it is a pleasant, almost tranquil puzzle, in which you move a number of monks along paths through a garden. Monks can't cross paths, of course, and some paths are only open to certain monks. At the end of the day, all monks should be back where they started, except for the blue and red monks, who should have switched positions. Serene. Meditative. Until you realize that the shortest solution for some of the Monk puzzles is on the order of 200 moves.

That's the brilliance of the program; it has the ability to start off with a simple puzzle and mutate it until it is almost impossible to solve. There is a series of "Dry Cleaner" puzzles, where the challenge is to move a dry cleaning rack along a system of tracks around a room; the warm-up puzzle requires 8 moves, but the fourth requires 25 - and it gets harder from there. The only series on this site that I've had any success in solving is the "Kung Fu Packing Crate" puzzles; I recommend trying them first if you don't want to have an aneurysm right off the bat.