Message #665

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Void Cube analogues
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 01:26:10 -0700

I don’t find the void cubes very interesting but I know other people
obviously like them. I do however love the mirror cube. I’ve seen one
and it’s quite handsome. It’s definitely the one I’d want to use in a
blindfold competition. :-) Actually I expect it could easily become
the favorite of cubers who are physically blind. A 4D analog of that one
sounds frightening. I still want to see a functional version of a simple
mirror. I haven’t completely gotten my head around that yet.

-Melinda

Roice Nelson wrote:
>
>
> I saw this at www.mathpuzzle.com <http://www.mathpuzzle.com/>:
>
> *Void Cube and other Variants*
> The 2007 winner of the Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition
> was the Void Cube <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDvcmiuxsNU>
> (youtube), by Katsuhiko Okamoto. These are now available at
> gentosha-edu.co.jp
> <http://www.gentosha-edu.co.jp/products/div-cl.html>. Easier to
> order are some of the exotics now available at mefferts.com
> <http://mefferts.com/>. The mirror block
> <http://www.yousaytoo.com/funforever/mirror-block-rubik-s-cube/11386>
> (yousaytoo) is another variant.
>
> These are pretty neat looking, and it would be relatively easy to make
> code changes for analogues… simply don’t draw 1C pieces, and alter
> the function which checks for a solved puzzle accordingly. Anyone
> want to comment on how this affects the difficulty or number of
> reachable positions?
>
> One random thing I could quickly observe is that number of
> checkerboard patterns on MC4D is extended for the void cube. As a
> specific example, an 8-cycle version of the checkerboard
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/4D_Cubing/photos/album/872915976/pic/1983894585/view?picmode=&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=1&count=20&dir=asc>
> is now possible (in that picture, one of course needs to ignore the 1C
> pieces).
>
> Some more questions I’d be interested to hear thoughts on: Could you
> have a physically stable 4D void cube version with no 1C pieces and no
> 2C pieces? I think the answer might be yes. And if so, do stable
> n-dimensional void cubes only need two piece types in general?
>
>
>