…or how I learned to stop thinking and love the pretty colours
plunk.org/~hatch/MagicCube4dApplet/
WARNING: Trying to auto-solve a 6x6x6x6 cube after a few hundred shift-9 scrambles has been known to overheat CPUs and/or crash browsers. Seriously. But it’s fun to watch.
The fact that your common-or-garden PC can solve it and very few humans can, is simply further testament to the superiority of the machines, and the inevitability of their domination over us.
Very interesting.
If I should ever have the time to devote to solving it, and should I actually succeed, I will let you know.
Thanx
I set it up on 6x6x6x6. and scrambled it a few hundred times. I’ll check back in a day or so to see if my computer has solved it yet.
The mathematically inclined may be interested to know that the number of possible states for the 4D cube is exactly
(24!x32!)/2 x 16!/2 x 2^23 x (3!)^31 x 3 x (4!/2)^15 x 4
which can also be expressed as
32! 24! 16! 2^22 6^32 12^15
or in decimal as
1 756 772 880 709 135 843 168 526
079 081 025 059 614 484 630 149
557 651 477 156 021 733 236 798
970 168 550 600 274 887 650 082
354 207 129 600 000 000 000 000
For comparison, the normal 3D Rubik’s Cube has only 43 252 0032 274 489 856 000 unique positions which is still huge. On the other hand, the 4D cube has more potential positions than the total number of atoms in the universe! Click the following link to learn how to calculate 4D cube permutations. Surprisingly, even though the number of 4D cube positions is frightenly large this doesn’t mean this puzzle is that many times harder to solve. If you can already solve the 3D cube, then you’re more than half way to solving this one. All the techniques you already know will apply here as well.
Wow! It’s already finished in under three minutes!!!
did you scramble it by using shift-S or shift-9?
shift S does the same thing whether you press it once or a hundred times, scramble it so that it is solvable in 40 moves. shift-9 scrambles it 9 moves away from it’s current position, and the effect is cumulative.
*tries to unscramble 6x6x6x6 (shift-4) *
… Well!.. I see this is going to take a while…