Message #4201

From: marnix.lenoble@gmail.com
Subject: New member introduction
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2019 13:51:57 +0000

Hello everyone,

I am Marnix and I recently made the 4D hall of fame list. I was asked to write a little message on here. I am a software developer. Thirty years old. In my free time I like reading about software related things, I play videogames, watch movies and tv-shows. Sometimes I read popularising science books.

I solved the regular rubik’s cube about 10 years ago. It took me a month and a week of on and off trying. I think it was around that time I found out about the 4D magic cube and it just seemed ridiculous. I remember opening the application and just going, yeah what the hell is this. I never really tried to solve it and knowing there were only dozens of people who solved it I thought it would be super hard. That is until the Mathologers video appeared in my feed with the title "Solving the 4D cube with simple 3D tricks". I didn’t watch the video but I decided to give it a try. It took me around 6 days so that’s actually faster than the regular cube.

My experience solving it was as follows: First I tried to get my head around what i was actually looking at. Figuring out that the sides were cubes, were connected to 6 other sides, and realizing that the cubies were actually just stickers and not pieces. This was also when I realized there were still 3 layers (I know that’s obvious but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me) and I decided to just use the three layer method to try and solve it.

I made steady progress and solved the first two layers using the keyhole tactic. After finishing that I had realized that moving a single piece from the unfinished layer to the finished layer wasn’t as straightforward as the regular cube because when you use the normal moves you end up moving 3 pieces to the other layer instead of 1. So I worked on making a few macro’s that can isolate hypercorners, corners, and edges. Knowing that if I figured out those then you can solve it like normal. Probably different than most but I solved the edges and hypercorners first and the corners last because that’s how I taught myself to do the regular cube too (doing corners first and edges last).

I made a time lapse and put it on youtube https://youtu.be/m8T2tCJ6i0k https://youtu.be/m8T2tCJ6i0k it’s not particularly interesting and it’s 10 minutes long but it’s there.

I am probably going to try a higher dimension one next.

Cheers,

Marnix