PUZZLE PURISTS DECAMP TO A CASTLE

Meet the Millers, George and Roxanne, proprietors of the world's largest collection of mechanical puzzles: physical objects that a puzzler holds and manipulates while seeking a solution. In total, the Miller collection — an accumulation of collections, and collections of collections — amounts to more than 80,000 puzzles. It comprises some five thousand Rubik's Cubes, including a 2-by-2-by-2 rendering of Darth Vader's head. And there are more than 7,000 wooden burr puzzles, such as the interlocking, polyhedral creations by Stewart Coffin, a Massachusetts puzzle maker; they evoke a hybrid of a pine cone and a snowflake and are Mr. Miller's favorites. Mrs. Miller is fond of their 140 brass, bronze and gold puzzle sculptures by the Spanish artist Miguel Berrocal; Goliath, a male torso in 79 pieces, is a puzzle that all puzzlers lust after, she said.

Until recently, the Miller collection resided at Puzzle Palace in Boca Raton, Fla., filling their mansion and a museum (a smaller house) next door. Puzzles occupied even the bathrooms. Then last year, on a whim, the Millers bought a 15th-century, 52-room castle in Panicale, a hamlet in central Italy. They packed their puzzle collection into five 40-foot shipping containers and, for their own transit, booked a cruise from Miami to Rome.

Before sailing away in April, the Millers went on a two-month road trip — a last hurrah, Mr. Miller called it — visiting puzzler friends from coast to coast. Along the way they accumulated more puzzles.

The Millers met at the International Puzzle Party in 2010, married in 2018 (after parallel divorces) and melded their collections. She came to the marriage with about 20,000 puzzles; he had a couple thousand.

Fast forward to 2021: The Millers acquired the 40,000-puzzle Hordern-Dalgety collection in Britain (previously two collections by Edward Hordern and James Dalgety; Mr. Hordern had amalgamated the collections of Edith Constance Jardine Senior and Eileen Scott, among others). You can see why we had to buy a castle, Mr. Miller told the computer scientist Donald Knuth during the couple's visit to his house in Stanford, Calif.

Over the years, Dr. Knuth and Mr. Miller have collaborated on a handful of puzzles, taking a difficult mathematical problem and solving it and then working out a mechanical analog, as Mr. Miller described the process. Their most successful collaboration was Cubigami 7: The goal is to fold 18 interlocking plastic squares into seven arrangements of four cubes, or tetracubes. Mr. Miller had casually mentioned the idea at a puzzle party. I stayed up all night working on it, Dr. Knuth said.

As they chatted, he opened a cupboard, jampacked with puzzles. I keep them all hidden because I don't know how to put them back together again, Dr. Knuth said.

To read the complete article, see:
Need a Home for 80,000 Puzzles? Try an Italian Castle. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/29/science/puzzles-mechanical-miller.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web