Message #761

From: Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Chronicles of a Rubik junkie’s experience with the {5}x{5} [3 Attachments]
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:04:16 -0600

Whoa, hold it right there! [Insert the sound of a vinyl LP scratching to a
halt here.] Did anybody not notice that buried in Chris’ message is the
announcement that he solved the dodecahedral prism?!?! That’s amazing! Way
to go Chris! That’s amazing! Way to go Chris! Check out the last entry in
the wiki hall-of-fame <http://wiki.superliminal.com/wiki/MC4D_Records>.

Very nice :) I had noticed, but had lumped my congratulations into one
general sentence (since Chris has been solving so many). But curious minds
do want to know, how was the experience compared to the others?

And now that I’m checking out the wiki HOF… Remi, how was the simplex
with 4-per-side?

The "officially" supported puzzles are the ones listed in the puzzle menu.
Ones that simply add more faces or more slices to other duoprisms are safe
as well but everything else at this time is "on thin ice", as you so
eloquently put it.

All the odd length puzzles with more faces and slices should be good as
Melinda said, but some of the large even length puzzles won’t work
correctly, e.g. I know {100}x{4} 2 is broken (sorry, repeating a little from
my response to David this morning). I do think this would quickly become
obvious to someone trying to solve such monsters. I went ahead and
opened issue
81 <http://code.google.com/p/magiccube4d/issues/detail?id=81> for this so we
can track it, but consider it low priority because I imagine needing these
won’t be necessary for a long time, and also because the large puzzles may
have other problems anyway - for example, the {20}x{20} 4 doesn’t work for
me due to memory problems rather than this issue.

And speaking of 5D puzzles: Roice, even if you don’t take the {5}x{5} 5
prize, maybe there’s still a 5D {5}x{5} 5 out there? That’d be very cool but
I have no idea since I’m stopping at 4D. I’ll leave the even higher
dimensional puzzles for a future generation of hypernauts. :-)

Yep, there are all sort of fun ones. You can take any of the 4D puzzles and
prism them into 5D, so e.g. {5}x{5}x{} 5 and {5,3}x{}x{} 5 would be valid 5D
puzzles. Not quite as symmetrical looking notation-wise, but still neat.
In 6D, there is the {5}x{5}x{5} 5
triprism<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6-polytope#Uniform_triprismatic_forms>.
And how about this for notational symmetry, the 8D {5}x{5}x{5}x{5} 5
quadprism<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-polytope#Uniform_quadprismatic_forms>
!

I’m sure Melinda knows this, but for the group… Don displays information
about some of the 5D puzzles if you try to enter them in the "invent your
own" box (it doesn’t work for all entries and don’t expect to see any actual
puzzles - that really is for the future hypernauts).

Btw, writing the above brought up yet another multiple notation situation:
{n}x{}x{} is the same ax {n}x{4}

seeya,
Roice

P.S. I loved your pictures Melinda, especially the {20]x{20} ones - so cool!