Message #870

From: Andrey <andreyastrelin@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] (unknown)
Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 19:23:10 -0000

Hi Melina and all!

I also can’t find myself in hall-of-fame list. I have sent log of the first solve to MagicCube4D@Superliminal.com but probably it was lost somewhere. Actually it was not the first my solve…

I’m Andrey Astrelin from Moscow. Now I work in Moscow State University and also take part in delevoping of 3D laser scanner (Surphaser).
First time I saw Rubic’s cube around 1982 and learned to solve it. Then there were tetrahendron and dodecahenron (Megaminx? It was in 1984). In 1985 (my second year in Mathematical dept. of MSU) I first time saw the computer - it was PDP 11/70 with operation system RSX (or RSL? Don’t remember). And my programming experience begun.
My first 4D game was, of course, rubic’s cube 3x3x3x3. It was on text terminal (we had no graphic terminals), with 4 visible faces and colours coded by letters A,B,…,H. And with keyboard input (no macros). I’ve scrambled it and solved. Once. Scrambled second time, made some twists, said "I know that I can do it anytime" and switched for other projects. As far as I remember it was in 1987.
Second 4D game was tetris. Position was shown in very simple graphics as orthogonal view from the top, with colour-coded height of each column. I have a version of this tetris written in C# somewhere on my computer, but now no time to play with it.
Some time ago I thought about rewrting on 3^4 cube, but tried to search for something like that on the web - and found MC4D. Solving of 3^4 took one day, without any macros and studying of algorithms. Then I spent some weeks trying to adapt some algorithm for 3^3 (my average result for 3^3 is 44 twists) to 3^4, but without success. Now I’m working on another way to solve it…