This was the very first large Cell Wall Transport System puzzle that I made back in 1996. (Three smaller puzzles were made before this one. Those puzzles, which used to be posted on the web site, were removed to be grouped with a series of smaller, warm-up puzzles. It is my intention to publish those puzzles in a compendium of my work.) It started off as only incrementally harder than ones I had made before. But two revisions increased the size of the puzzle from eight to fifteen compartments, four to seven objects.

This was also an early implementation of a core concept I devised that has influenced many of my puzzles. Instead of simply going through and placing one object into its receptor over and over again, here you must plan ahead. Making seemly random moves at the beginning of the puzzle in order to set up the right orientation of the objects increases the difficulty by a large margin. It violates one of the key problem solving heuristics that most people use in unfamiliar territory: proximity to the goal. That would probably be measured here by the number of objects placed into receptors (since the goal is getting them all there in the end). Moving around objects and not getting them into receptors would seem like a waste of time. Here it’s a necessity to set everything up in a first pass, then knock everything down in a second pass.

When this puzzle was published in the magazine (remember, it was the first published Cell Wall Transport System puzzle), my editor decided to redraw the puzzle. This was pretty standard at that point in time, since I was not yet versed in computer illustration programs. However, she felt that the biological nature of the structure of the puzzle should be expressed by drawing the puzzle as a set of cells and their protein transports. I really disliked how the redrawn puzzle looked. I am a very faithful follower of the core Bauhaus mentality “Less is more” (most famously used in architecture). I like to try and express the maximum amount of information in simple, transparent (the meaning is clear, not the graphic itself) ways. If it isn’t absolutely necessary, get rid of it. The cell drawing wasn’t clean, and it wasn’t simple. One of the rare times that my editor and I disagreed, but it’s water under the bridge. In future issues, they kept my illustration of the puzzle.