Message #528

From: Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Re: Did I Hear MC6D??
Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 09:42:32 -0500

We were kind of flying by the seat of our pants, and so I would say the
answer to your question is definitely the latter for me. I for one didn’t
think we’d make a solvable puzzle, and in fact was dubious of the
possibility of a clear representation for a long time. I think Remi may
have been different (he really seemed to want the 5D puzzle),
and he presented ideas on the representation that convinced us that it might
be possible, so then we made a more involved proof of concept display. That
was enough to get the motivation ball rolling for making a workable puzzle.

This all unfolded in the group discussions in March 2006. If you’re
interested to peruse some of that, things started with message
217<http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/4D_Cubing/messages/217?xm=1&o=0&l=1>,
but one of the more productive and full threads was this one:

*
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/4D_Cubing/messages/218?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1
*

cya,
Roice

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 8:48 AM, Jenelle Levenstein <
jenelle.levenstein@gmail.com> wrote:

> The images of the MC6D look amazing. Somewhere I heard that when the
> first rubrics cube was invented it was designed as a mechanical puzzle and
> was never really meant to be solved. So my question is when you designed the
> MC5D did you expect someone to solve it or were you just creating it to
> solve the graphical puzzle of displaying a 5Drubix cube on 2D computer
> screen.
>
> On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 3:07 PM, Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I should have perhaps used the album feature of yahoo groups instead
>> of attaching pics, which I just noticed when editing the wish
>> list (sorry for any possible trouble). The pics are here now too:
>>
>> http://games.ph.groups.yahoo.com/group/4D_Cubing/photos/browse/6d1c
>>
>> cya,
>> Roice
>>
>> On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I don’t think MC6D is in development, and the discussion about really
>>> making one isn’t serious, but interesting for sure! For myself, I also
>>> don’t think the puzzle would be fun ;) But anyway, Nelson Makes a good
>>> point about the problem of too many centrally projected axes. I actually
>>> did a little proof of concept investigation of the MC6D display a while
>>> ago (very little code was required), and so I can show a few screen shots.
>>> These would be a display of 3^6 where all stickers are drawn as points
>>> (instead of 5-cubes). I’m attaching 3 pics, the first with the 3 higher-d
>>> axes all centrally projected, the second with 2 of 3 centrally projected,
>>> and the third with only 1 of 3 centrally projected. The offsets of the
>>> projection points from center in the latter two cases were just given some
>>> arbitrary values, as there could be a lot of choices. This is as far as
>>> I wanted to take it myself, but I’m happy to send anyone the 100 or so lines
>>> of code I hacked into MC5D to produce these if they wanted to take it any
>>> further.
>>>
>>> Btw, when I had looked at this, I came to the conclusion that I liked
>>> MC5D with the uv axes both centrally projected better than giving one an off
>>> axes projection, so I didn’t take any time to try to add extended projection
>>> possibilities as a feature (How would the UI provide a nice way to choose
>>> the offset anyway?). I just made one more screen shot with an example
>>> non-central MC5D projection. I’ve always liked the look of 4-cubes
>>> centrally projected better as well, maybe because I perceive it as appearing
>>> more symmetrical. But I do think in the MC4D case, it could be a cool
>>> extension nonetheless… I just saw Melinda’s email, so I think I’ll go add
>>> this to the group wish-list :)
>>>
>>> Roice
>>>
>>
>
>