Vess Cola, Part 1.

When I was growing up, I had a wonderful window+grandmotherly next door neighbor--Gerri (Jeri? Geraldine?) LeVeaux. She was the kind of next door neighbor who always had cookies for us kids and paid us $1 to mow her tiny lawn even though she was perfectly able to mow it herself.

Some time, when I was a kid, she gave me a puzzle she said belonged to her son. I became the proud caretaker of the Vess Puzzle.

Hmmm... I need to scan the back of the pieces, too.

I've long since lost the envelope the puzzle came in. But the puzzle is simple enough. Match up the same color top and bottom of the Vess Cola bottles.

During college, I'd get the puzzle out of my desk, solve it to avoid doing homework.

A little while ago, I started talking with my father-in-law about puzzles. I hadn't played with Vess for quite a while so I brought out the puzzle. And couldn't solve it.

Being a programmer nerd, I thought Vess would be a fun programming problem. So I set about solving the puzzle with a Python script.