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Games guru: |
![]() Dr. László Nagy with his rhomboid pentominoes game In 1998, a Hungarian professor, Dr. László Nagy, launched a fine website celebrating recreational mathematics: Pentomino HungarIQa. (Love that IQ allusion in the name.) It introduced to Hungarian audiences the joys of pentominoes, tangrams, and a set of rhomboid pentominoes that László (Laci to his friends) had independently discovered a few years after Kate Jones first introduced RhombiominoesTM in 1990. Laci (Luh-tsee) designed his pentarhombs different from Kate's in two important ways. Where Rhombiominoes are only the 20 distinct pentarhombs, the HungarIQa model is a full double set of left-slant and right-slant pentominoes, yielding 24 tiles in all (4 being their own duplicates). And where Rhombiominoes contains 3 colors so that a 10x10 grid can be filled with no two of the same color joined, Laci's set has just two colors, so the left slant and right slant subset each gets its own color. The Pentomino HungarIQa website has an ongoing contest for the first solution to any of the listed figures, and a Hall of Fame of successful solvers' names. While the instructions are only in Hungarian at this time, the introduction page is in English, and translations are planned. Kadon is considering an alliance. After all, what are the chances that the first two people to publish independently about turning pentominoes into rhombuses would both be Hungarian, half a globe apart? László's greatest love is strategy games, and his board games website has dozens of online-playable classics. Check them out. The pictures are guide enough despite the Hungarian text.
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