Message #943

From: Andrey <andreyastrelin@yahoo.com>
Subject: MC7D v0.12 uploaded
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:32:42 -0000

New version of the program is here: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/4D_Cubing/files/MC7D/
There are only small changes:

• twists counter doesn’t count start/stop macro commands;
  
• macros in F1..F2 block are not expanded in the reverse block and Undo/Redo works with them correctly.

New twists counter shows that my solve of 3^5 was 4361 twists long.

Couple of things about 3^7:
It has about 5.4*10^8936 possible states (if I didn’t miss some invariant). It is more than 120-Cell and somewhere between 5^5 and 6^5.
"Computational limit" of number of operations to solve it is about 3400, but it can be improved (increased) if we take in account sequences of operations on the same side (or couple of opposite sides) and find number of possible positions after 1,2,.. sequentional twists of that side.
If you spend two minutes for the positioning of one piece (one to move it to place and another to rotate it), it will take about 72 hours to solve the cube. So we may expect first solutions in a month or two (but may be faster, e.g. in 3 days of continuous work :D )