Most of the time, challenges I tackle with Ruby solve code-related problems. This includes things like web services, scripts, chatbots, etc., all of which are virtual in some way. Recently though, I decided to solve a puzzle in the real world.
My son was trying to put together a wooden puzzle. It requires having four colors (blue, green, red, and yellow) each present on all four sides of a rectangle. These colors are on wooden cubes that can be rotated. So four cubes, each with six sides to rotate around. It turns out that this means there are a lot of possible combinations of these cubes, most of which won’t work. By my math, there are six sides that can face up (a “y” axis), multiplied by four possible rotations around that axis (6 * 4 = 24) for each cube. Raised to the power of the four cubes (24^4 = 331776). After about 30 minutes of hearing his frustration, I told him “I bet I can solve this puzzle with some code” but he was skeptical.
I took that as a challenge to both my coding skills and his respect for me as his dad, so I obliged. After finishing, I figured it would be worth sharing.