Message #37

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Orientations of the centre cubes
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2003 23:07:20 -0700

Jay Carlton wrote:

> […] from an aesthetics standpoint, one of the most pleasing aspects
> a
> solved 3x3x3 cube is the fact that each face is a solid color, with 9
> identical squares. I think the elegance would suffer if you mark the
> center square. Lastly, the center cubes in the 4D system are fairly
> difficult to see as it is, and if they were marked with seven
> different colors each, it
> would just be painful.

you wouldn’t need to "mark the center" in any special way. mark’s
picture cube would "mark" (i.e. orient) all stickers equally and in my
mind is a reasonably elegant modification to the original puzzle. as an
aside, i may be remembering incorrectly but i think that rubik once made
their own official oriented cube that they ironically called "4D" even
though it had nothing to do with 4D; just had their logo on each face.
anyway, the perfect 4D analog to pasting a picture on each face of the
original cube would be to carve each 4D hyperface from a different block
of wood, marble, or some other 3D texture. very possible to do using 2D
textures applied to each face of each hypersticker, and you may not find
it unattractive, though i don’t know if people would find it interesting
enough seeing as how the 3D picture cubes never really caught on.

-melinda