Message #493

From: Jenelle Levenstein <jenelle.levenstein@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Magic120Cell Realized
Date: Mon, 05 May 2008 00:35:06 -0500

Wow. Its really amazing. I like the ring coloring best. I’m not sure whether
I would attempt to solve it. I’m sure it would be possible and the moves
would be easy but there are so many pieces. The ghost piece feature is a
neat effect. How many hidden cells are there on this thing? I would imagine
there are a lot but that is just my intuition.

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 11:38 PM, Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com> wrote:

> Honestly, the reason I wasn’t planning on working through a solution was
> that I am a bit scared of the sheer number of pieces! I just finished up
> the final parts that I felt were needed for it to be solvable today, and I
> actually haven’t even figured out a single sequence yet. So as of this
> evening, I only have the thoughts about it we’ve discussed in the past,
> which is that it will be easier in some ways than MC4D because of the larger
> space to sequester pieces, but that it will be a big effort in time. Also,
> I think I am ready for a bit of a rest and was too excited to share to let
> it sit on a shelf. Sarah will be happy to get my attention back now too
> since I’ve been spending a lot of time on it lately :)
>
> Since I haven’t been through it, I hope there are enough features for a
> solution (there are no macros yet, and I could see that being the first
> request as people start attacking it, but it will be a while before I look
> at that). I think my fear at this point is that some stupid bug would
> somehow corrupt someones solution after they worked on it for a long time!
> Working through MC5D myself was able to quell that worry last time. But the
> scrambling and autosolve has had a decent amount of exercise as I’ve worked
> on it, so I think all should be ok.
>
> Writing a general 4D puzzle engine certainly would be a huge achievement.
> It was nice to be able to hardcode 120 cell characteristics throughout the
> code, and I certainly did - I can’t imagine having worked without that
> luxury at this point. I also realized through this effort that I understood
> general 4D rotations very badly, and still do though I’ve improved a
> little. It was so much easier when everything was coordinate axis aligned.
> I was able to glean just enough from the results of a paper (
> http://www.geometrictools.com/Documentation/RotationsFromPowerSeries.pdf),
> which combined with some experimentation to figure out how to calculate the
> rotation matrix coefficients allowed me to get working code for "simple
> rotations". Wiki has some more info on that term if anyone is interested (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SO%284%29).
>
> Anyway, I won’t go on too much for now, but I look forward to more
> discussion about this puzzle. Thank you so much for your highly positive
> email :)
>
> Roice
>
>
> On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 9:44 PM, Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Roice rocks!!!
> >
> > Don and I have been cooking up plans to support more puzzles including
> > this one in MC4D for some time but Roice beat us to the best one. The
> > 120 cell holds a special place in the pantheon of regular polyhedra in
> > all dimensions. It has no analog in any dimension greater than 4. If
> > puzzles were planets, the 120 cell would be Saturn. Being the first to
> > tame this beauty will earn you a special place in history, though the
> > task may be as hard as being the first to visit Saturn. We’re lucky that
> >
> > Roice didn’t solve it before publishing it. Please tell us why, Roice?
> > Did you try to but underestimate the difficulty or did you just want to
> > give everyone a chance? The screen shots are amazingly beautiful and it
> > is such a gift to the world that you would have been completely
> > justified to have kept it secret until first solve.
> >
> > Thank you so much!
> > -Melinda
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