The package I’ve been impatiently waiting for finally arrives: A cardboard box about as tall as your average Olympic gymnast. It’s covered in yellow packing tape, stamped fragile, and has a return address in a town in the Netherlands.
Inside this box is a thing of beauty—and absurdity. It’s a one-of-a-kind puzzle created just for me by one of the greatest puzzle makers in the world. It is, almost surely, the hardest puzzle ever to exist. But before I open the box, let me tell you how the puzzle came to be, and why I think it’s not a trivial pursuit.
To do that, I’ll need to start with the Chinese ring puzzle. I was introduced to it by a puzzle collector named Wei Zhang, who, along with her husband, Peter Rasmussen, is famous in the puzzle community for having one of the world’s best collections of Chinese puzzles. Also called a “patience puzzle,” the ring puzzle dates back about 2,000 years, at least in its simplest form. What particularly fascinates me about this kind of puzzle is that it’s recursive: It gets much, much harder the more rings it has.
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