Dice Safe Rationale
Aug. 13, 2020What would the ultimate puzzle box look like?
In my view, the ultimate puzzle box would take the form of a simple cube: no buttons, no screens, no flaws.
But how would you input a password into such a device?
One option could be to connect it to a remote device for input. That could work, but I want to go for something more old-school, with no wireless connections involved — everything purely physical. To achieve this, we can define two types of motion to communicate with the box: shaking and turning.
With these motions, creating a password system becomes straightforward. You can start by shaking the box to initiate the sequence, followed by a series of turns that act as the password.
I’ll call it the Dice Safe, for its unique motion-controlled mechanism.
However, there’s a challenge: if the safe is a perfect cube, identical on all sides (front, back, left, and right), it can easily have a different orientation than the user. For example, if the user inputs a password sequence like “right, forward, right” but the safe is rotated 90 degrees, it will interpret the sequence as “back, right, back”.
To overcome this, we can introduce an additional element in the password sequence to serve as a reference point for the user’s orientation. Rather than relying on specific directional inputs, we can use the relative differences between each input as the actual password. This ensures that the sequence is interpreted correctly, no matter how the box is oriented.
Tags: Dice Safe
