This puzzle was invented by the Dutch mathematician and philosopher Piet Hein and is based upon the dissection of a cube into 27 cubelets. From these we can make 6 differently shaped pieces (2 of which are mutual mirror-images) by glueing together 4 cubelets, and a single piece from the odd 3 left over. These are pictured below:
The aim of the project is to write a program which allows the user to play this puzzle. The program should display the pieces of the puzzle on the screen, and pieces should be moveable in the X- Y- and Z-axes from the keyboard. Illegal moves should be disallowed (blocks may not intersect!) and the program should be able to "explode" and reassemble the pieces so that the structure of any particular solution can be seen. Colouring the pieces differently may also help the player to visualise what's going on.
The puzzle is open-ended, because the pieces may be assembled into many other shapes. For instance, if we discard the 3-cublet piece, the remaining pieces can be assembled into a 2x3x4 cuboid. One possible extension might be to allow the user to design other possible shapes as solutions.