Puzzle researcher: Toby Gottfried
Toby Gottfried is a computer programmer who has been solving edgematching puzzles and using computers to study them since his college days in the 1970s. He has contributed great statistics on solution counts for our Multimatch I and II sets.

Toby has written an applet for solving Blokus puzzles and presents a long list of great puzzle questions to investigate. You can also see an awesome symmetrical solution — Toby managed to fit all 84 Blokus pieces into an 18x20 grid with only 4 holes remaining, symmetrically placed, and pieces of the same color all touching only at corners. Then he outdid himself with a 21x17 grid with only one hole remaining and opposite sides symmetrically juxtaposed. Wow! You can play the applet right on his website. Toby also did the program for Pentolla, where you can play a Blokus-like game, including tournament style for fans of the game all over the world.

For Doris, he devised many of the geometric patterns, provided the statistics on the numbers of solutions, and found some of the striking symmetric solutions. For more information about Doris and other puzzles and games, visit his website, where you can also play some cool online puzzles. Find his Doris pages under Octamatch.

Toby gave a terrific presentation about his work on Doris at Doris' world premiere on March 28, 2008, at the 8th Gathering for Gardner in Atlanta, Georgia. He lives and teaches in California.



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