OddThinking

I was told the toy was called “Marbleous” or “Marble Madness” or something. No one knows its real name, but that’s not important. It was a marble run (very similar to this one) that you put together like building blocks, and then drop a marble in and watch it roll along the channels to the bottom. A kid’s toy. Nothing special. Until the crew from the UWA Juggling Club got to it and made it their own.

Julian learns the basics

I was introduced to it last Saturday at a party in Canberra, that was hosted and attended by several ex-UWA-ites; I was early, and there were few people there, so our host, Nic, explained the way it was played. You didn’t just build arbitrary marble runs like a little kid – you accepted a challenge! He gave me a task – get the marble from the height of the coffee table to the floor. It was a beginner’s challenge, just to get the idea of how the pieces fit together – to understand what would work, and what wouldn’t. I had soon met the challenge, and then I was ready to play with the big boys.

Julian teams up to take on the current house challenge

For that house, the outstanding challenge that had been previously attempted, and failed, was to get the marble from the height of the mantelpiece, to the floor, via the guitar.

This took me a bit longer, but, with the help of Cassie, we had a complex path, with the guitar precariously balanced, handle down, from the mantelpiece to the sofa. After only three attempts failing slightly short, we managed to get the marble to roll down the guitar strings, into an open channel which drew the marble down a tube (supported laterally by a carefully arranged cross-piece), where it would be ejected into yet another open channel, connected to the main triple-silo triangular structure that brought the marble gently to Earth, to polite applause.

Cassie and I declared our team, Team Granite, to be the Marbleous Champions, and returned to the party.

Another challenger emerges

That would have been that, except that I kept pondering one of the marble run design constraints (that long drops lead to bouncing out of the contraption) and I checked some counter-intuitive physics theory with Mark D. Now, Mark is totally unlike me, in that he is a bit of a competitive geek, so it wasn’t long until he heard the story and demanded the opportunity to take on Team Granite.

We found a nearby Bongo drum, and set the challenge – Bongo drum to floor, via at least two different routes. I thought it would be a reasonably challenging beginner task. A triple-silo double-helix would have sufficed, with Mark dropping marbles simultaneously in two places. But, no! Mark pushed it further.

Mark surpasses expectations

Mark set up two structures – one set on the ground, while the other sat high above it on the drum. The top piece of the drum structure was only connected at one end. He dropped the first marble into this free-floating piece. When the marble got to the far end, it dropped through the air to the carefully-lined up floor-based structure and began its homeward run. Meanwhile, Mark quickly twisted the top piece until it was aligned with a second part of the silo, and sent the second marble on its way. It landed on a second part of the sub-structure, and began a separate descent to the bottom.

That wasn’t the end of Mark’s ingenuity, though. In a subtle homage to 531, the first marble was sent along a longer path than the second, so it arrived after the second one.

The audience were impressed. Mark had taken a beginner challenge, and turned it into a championship masterpiece. Team Granite demanded he set the new challenge to assure our championship position.

Team Granite Fights Back

Mark explained that our structure must involve three balls (marbles) and three juggling clubs. Cassie and I debated the structure for a while – how could we not only meet the challenge, but put our own twist on it to ensure that the championship remained ours?

With Pablo’s assistance, we found an elegant solution. Four simple towers stood tall, simply connected in a spoke arrangement only at the very top. The spokes were curved to provide resting places for the clubs.

Our performance was in three acts.

In Act I, we dropped the balls simulataneously into the the top of the radial silos, and the audience watched expectantly as the balls merely rolled into the middle, and dropped down inside the middle tower.

In Act II, we carefully extracted the clubs, and performed a simultaneous flourish for effect, to oohs and aahs.

In Act III, we each took hold of the structure, and lifted it to show that the three balls were not as expected, under the central tower, but had instead magically teleported to be beneath the external towers.

Marbles. Club-twirling. Presdigitation. It was truly an act to behold, and if it wasn’t for a slight technical flaw that partly revealed the secret to the teleportation gimmick, it would have been an invincible combination.

Instead, it merely spurred Mark on to take on the next challenge, and try to win back what was rightfully ours.

Mark’s challenge

We set a simple challenge. Use at least four marbles and the two available bongo drums to play an aesthetically pleasant rhythm. Mark, with a mind like Rube Goldberg, set to work.

About an hour later, he emerged again, with a precarious, never-tested, contraption. One bongo drum was inverted and suspended by the marble run above the other. The torn cardboard of an old pizza box balanced on the inverted drum provided the platform for a maze of interwoven marble runs coming towards the centre from all angles. The whole thing was surrounded by no less than six volunteers, who, on Mark’s cue, simultaneously dropped a marble each into one of the waiting hoppers. Each marble wove past the others, back and forth, and different rates, until they reached the centre and dropped through the air, into the invert drum and “bopped” out a beat.

Even the failure of a single marble’s run was not enough to quell the roar of the crowd, and Mark proved that he was the current reigning champion.

Cassie and I looked at each other, shrugged and surrendered. There was no simply point in continuing the fight.