Message #3490

From: Eli Reid <reideli@rocketmail.com>
Subject: Introducing myself, *long post warning*
Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2016 19:28:12 +0000

Hello everyone! I am Eli Reid and I solved the 3^4 puzzle yesterday. I’m 18 years old and am from Scotland. I live in a village of about 600 people in what one might call the middle of nowhere (not that it’s the most remote place there is, far from it), which is my favourite place that I’ve visited or lived in so far in the world (it’s my home, so of course I would say that, wouldn’t I?). 
I should add that I only got a computer last December, so I’m not really too sure how to get it to do everything I want it to yet, but I was able to find and download MagicCube4D, so I’m doing OK I think!

Alright then, some stuff about me. I have two brothers, one who is my (‘fraternal’, or ‘not identical’ as I more commonly have to say) twin, and the other who is much younger than me, who are both the best brothers in the world, not that I’m biased or anything. 

I have travelled a fair bit (my parents travelled the world together and lived in various countries before having children). I have visited all of the following countries/places: Canada; France; Wales; hundreds of locations in England and Scotland, from the lake district to the Orkney Islands; Switzerland; Greece; Denmark; Malaysia; Majorca; the Bahamas (I lived there for a year and a half when I was about three) - well, all over the place really. I intend to increase the size of this list a great deal in the future.
I have interests in all sorts of things, but I’ll list them in no particular order:
Academically, most of my interest lies with the empirical sciences and with mathematics. Not much to say there, except that physics is my favourite.
I like French (reading, writing, speaking, listening to it…whatever), Warhammer, Yu-Gi-Oh!, mtg, Origami, juggling (3 objects, or 2 in one hand, not 4 just yet), walking about in the countryside (mostly where I live), making (and eating) nice food (which translates to food preferably involving basil, garlic and olive oil - I’m vegetarian, and one of my grandmothers is Italian, if that explains that), …
…and of course, I enjoy solving puzzles. Particularly puzzles of the twisty variety. I solved the Rubik’s cube (3x3x3) last year, but (though it frustrates me that I did so) I used the booklet that came with it to help me solve it (it was a something something special anniversary edition cube that included a ‘handy solution guide’), which unfortunately made solving it not seem quite so wonderful nor impressive. Not that I really realised that it would at the time. 
However, I did then learn some speedsolving algorithms, and was content to use those, and play about with the cube, until last month. When I decided I would solve some other twisty puzzles myself. So, I then went online and found a simulator for various cubes. And solved the 2x2x2 (which was easy), then the 4x4x4, and then the 5x5x5, in the space of a couple of days. They weren’t particularly difficult - the solving of the centres and the edges was quite intuitive, and then it was just a 3x3x3 with complications, the complications being the only difficult part, really. I deliberately avoided using someone else’s algorithms for these. It was then, about two weeks ago, when I watched the mathologer video (I was subscribed, but because of the mathsy videos not the expectation of seeing a cube video.) describing the 4D cube and how you could fiddle with the settings to make it look like a 3D cube, do a sequence, then fiddle the settings again and see what happened, using this as a starting point to make commutators for your algorithms. So I found the MagicCube4D site, downloaded the program, and the rest, as they say, is history. All credit to mathologer for giving such an intuitive explanation for how to make algorithms for the 4D cube, (and for not telling me what the algorithms actually were, because that could have made solving it feel like much less of an accomplishment.) 
Interestingly enough, my first solve of the 4D … hypercube? Tesseract? I like both names … *ahem* my first solve took exactly thirty thousand twists. (I had two or three macros that took about 1200 twists, which might explain that)
OK so this seemed post quite long to me, but feel free to send zillions of replies or completely ignore it, as you please.