Eagle AS

A Norwegian limited company at Straume, west of Bergen, with one director, one employee and one thing in the catalogue. All three are the same person.

Eagle AS is an aksjeselskap — the ordinary Norwegian limited form, which means the company is a legal person distinct from the man who runs it, that it files annual accounts, and that it is entered in the Brønnøysund registers like any other. Nils Ingemund Hoff is its director and signs for it.

What it doesWrites and publishes Android software. At present that means one puzzle, Virvel, and nothing else.

What it does not doDespite the domain this page is served from, Eagle AS has nothing to do with cosmetics, and despite the bird, nothing to do with aviation.

On the domain, before you wonder

eagle.makeup is a short name that happened to be available, and .makeup is simply the suffix it came with. No product sold here is a cosmetic. It is worth saying plainly, because a company with an eagle for a logo, a beauty-industry web address and a brass puzzle for a product is an odd enough combination to deserve one sentence of explanation rather than none.

How it is run

A small company behaves like a small company. Here is what that means in practice, since it affects what you can reasonably expect from us.

There is no team, no support department and no overnight rota. Work is done at Straume, in office hours and a good many evenings, by the person named on every page of this site. When something breaks, the person who reads your message is the person who fixes it, which is slower than a call centre and considerably more likely to end in a repair.

No roadmap is published

Because a roadmap from a one-person company is a promise it cannot keep. Features arrive when they are finished. If a thing you need is missing, writing to us is a more effective route than waiting for it to appear on a timeline.

Nothing phones home

The software published here is built to work without a network connection, and we do not collect analytics from it. This is a deliberate choice with a real cost: we genuinely do not know how many people finished a level or where they gave up, and we would rather be told than measure you.

What we will not claim

That a puzzle trains your brain, sharpens your focus, or improves anything about you. It is a puzzle. Prices, if any apply, appear on the Google Play listing and nowhere else — nothing on this site is an offer or a quotation.

Virvel

The one title in the catalogue — a rotating-rings puzzle, built to look and behave like an engraved brass dial.

Concentric rings each carry carved grooves, and every ring starts out of line. You turn them, a notch at a time, until the grooves meet and form one unbroken channel running from the hub to the rim. Every dial ships with a verified alignment, so a solution always exists, and a recorded best-case turn count to chase if you want a clean solve. Undo a turn, reset the dial, or take a hint that moves one ring the right way.

On your phone onlyNo account, no advertising, no network permission. Turn counts and progress are kept on the handset.

Where to find itGoogle Play, under the package name com.ringdreie.virvel.

The detail of what is and is not kept is set out in the privacy notice for Virvel, which is written to be read rather than scrolled past.

A dial, counted

A claim worth checking, about the puzzle but not inside it: a scrambled dial is far quicker to bring into line than it looks, and the obvious plan is wrong about half the time.

Take a dial of k rings with n notches, one groove on each ring. The obvious bound is that no ring ever needs turning more than halfway round, so k × ⌊n/2⌋ turns must always be enough. True — and badly pessimistic, because you also get to choose which radial line to aim for.

Rings5 Notches12

Ways the dial can be scrambled248,832

Obvious bound — k × ⌊n/2⌋ turns30

Turns the very worst scramble actually needs14

Average over every scramble9.59

Scrambles where aiming at the fullest line is wrong49.1%

What is not here: a level, a hint, or a solver. This builds dials of its own and walks every possible scramble of them. It will not tell you which ring to turn on a dial in the game, because it has never seen one — it counts what is true of dials in general, which is a different thing from knowing an answer.

Writing to us

One mailbox, read by one person, with no automatic acknowledgement in front of it.

The companypost@eagle.makeup — about Eagle AS itself, invoices, or anything formal.

The puzzledial@eagle.makeup — bugs, a dial that will not come into line, a wrong turn count.

Norwegian or English

Begge deler går fint. Write in whichever you are comfortable with.

If you hear nothing

Nothing here sends a receipt, so silence is not confirmation that your message arrived. If two working days pass without an answer, assume it went astray rather than that it was ignored, and send it again.

On data

If you are writing about personal data — a request for access, erasure or anything else the GDPR gives you — the privacy notice sets out what we hold, which is very little, and names the supervisory authority you may go to instead of us.