My mother gave the fam a new game for Xmas called “The Impossible Puzzle.” Or maybe that was the company name. Either way, the label is certainly apt.

The puzzle is composed of nine, 4-sided pieces with interlocking parts in the shapes of the 4 card suits (hearts, diamonds, etc). There is only one way to lock the 9 pieces into a 3X3 square, and the game touts the fact that “there are over 300,000 combinations, only one of which is correct.”

My mother, her bf, and myself all fiddled with this puzzle for a while before becoming too frustrated. There seemed to be no way to logically sort through the options of all possible arrangements and rotations of the pieces and clearly a brute-force method of trying all combinations would take way too long by hand. But maybe not for a computer. So, I figured this would be an excellent opportunity to try out my programming skills.

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