Message #3989

From: damienturtle@hotmail.co.uk
Subject: Re: Physical 2x2x2x2 canonical moves video
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2018 00:57:31 +0000

Hi all,

Finally starting to catch up with discussions, and I’m happy that the set of legal moves seems to have been established. I assume that I can take the set of moves in Melinda’s video here as the moves I can use for solving? That suits me fine. I did however seem to find a different approach for that awkward type of full puzzle rotation that seems to be getting called a gyro move. I made a rough video demonstrating it, hopefully it’s clear enough. I’ve not learned the notation yet so I don’t know how to write it down.

https://youtu.be/TP8v-rXbJmc https://youtu.be/TP8v-rXbJmc

I have a question about this. As executed, it’s 6 ‘moves’. However, after 5 moves it’s in a legal state and the last move is a legal move. Does that mean I can stop after 5 moves? Does the answer depend on whether the next move I do after the gyro is to separate the two 2x2x2 cubes, reorient them, and put them back together, since it’s the same type of move and therefore they can be simplified into a single move?

I’ve not been able to film with my usual setup recently but that should be back to normal soon (don’t worry, just lots of tidying and organising my flat and things are a bit of a mess). I’ll get some more videos up soon hopefully, including a solve once I’ve practised some.

I also made a scrambler, unfortunately the closest thing to a programming language I can use is R, which might not be common enough to be useful. Rather than random moves, it generates a random (legal) position and outputs an image. I then assemble the puzzle into that state. Personally I think this works fine as I’m too busy looking for pieces to take in much information and benefit from a lot of inspection time, but I’m interested in what others think. I understand if people are sceptical of seeing the scrambled state too much, but I think it’s worth the trade-off for being fully scrambled. I’ll happily try to make the code available if anyone wants, but if there’s enough demand it might be better if someone makes a more portable version, it wasn’t too difficult to code.

Matt