Books, Hallways, and social butterflies: A note on sliding block puzzles

Interest in sliding block puzzles dates back to the 15-puzzle, seemingly invented by Noyes Chapman in 1874 (see [23] for an account of the fascinating history of the puzzle). The game consists of fifteen movable square blocks numbered and arranged within a square box, leaving one empty space (see Figure 1). The task at hand is to start from a given configuration of the numbered blocks and reach the desired target configuration, where the only allowed move is to slide a numbered block into an adjacent empty space. This task seemed to be unpredictably either very easy to accomplish, or completely impossible, and the puzzle turned into a worldwide sensation in the spring of 1880. A particularly challenging instance, known as the 13-15-14 puzzle, consisted of initial and target configurations that differed by a single swap (historically this swap involved the blocks labeled 14 and 15). The craze of this puzzle was such that it consistently made newspaper headlines in 1880, with an article in the New York Times lamenting that it was “threatening our free institutions” [23, p. 9]. Various prizes were offered for anyone who could solve this challenge, beginning with a $25 set of teeth and culminating with Sam Loyd’s famous $1,000 cash prize.