SOMA News

2 January 2023 E-Mail.

We were writing 2022-10-16 when Andy Lewicki sendt me a new mail, this time though it was not about SOMA
And usually, I only show SOMA stuff.
This one however was different - I will let Andy explain in his eMail.

Subject: Lo Shu "dominated"
Date: 2022-10-16
From: Andy Lewicki
To: Thorleif Bundgaard

Hi Thorleif, I am sending you my latest "product". I Think you will like it since this big Magic Square has Magic Sum 27 (Soma's number).
I created 9 separate Magic Squares 4x4 using domino tiles. Nextly I plugged it into Lo Shu scheme and the new "dominated" 3x3 Magic Square was born.
Magic Sum for the big one is 27 ( rows, colums and two diagonals), and the small squares have Sum from 5 to 13.
The main task was to create 9 squares with domino. Lots of work.
    Hope you like it.
    Best regards
    Andy.

This is in my opinion a very impressive creation.
A long time I have thought about Andy's fine puzzle, where to put it.
Finally, now about 2 months later I decided that it should have a nice place in a Newsletter on my SOMA puzzle site.
Yes, yes - I know - this is a SOMA site. - But not only so. Once in a while I have posted other stuff. (See the list further down)

I can almost imagine the hardship it was for Andy to get those Dominoes, and their 2-number combinations,
to fit into a magic square. And then even, to make 9 such squares.
AND on top of that, having them sum up to each value from 5 through 13.

      8  13   6
      7   9  11
     12   5  10

These Dominoes show the numbers: 1 1 6 0     1 6 2 4     2 3 0 1 2 3 0 3     6 2 4 1     1 1 0 4   1 4 1 2     3 2 5 3     0 2 3 1 4 0 1 3     3 3 2 5     3 0 3 0     1 3 2 1     1 3 0 5     2 4 1 4 1 2 1 3     4 3 2 0     4 1 2 4   0 0 4 3     3 1 3 2     3 3 5 0 5 2 0 0     1 2 4 2     2 3 3 3     6 1 3 2     3 1 1 0     2 3 1 4 1 3 4 4     2 0 1 2     5 0 3 2   4 5 0 3     0 4 0 1     1 1 6 2 1 3 5 3     0 0 3 2     2 6 0 2

For each square, the horizontal sum, the vertical sum, and each diagonal sum, are 8, 13, 6,     7, 9, 11,    12, 5, 10.
For the whole set, each horizontal line has as sum of 27, and each vertical column have the sum of 27
And even the two grand diagonals sum up to 27.
Exactly the number of cubes in the SOMA set.



So - these are the 9 "Magic squares" Do enjoy them.
By the way - 9 is the number of cubes at each of a SOMA cubes 3 levels

Other stuff, described in Newsletters but not directly related to SOMA Can be found here.