Message #997

From: Andrey <andreyastrelin@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Sub-100K for 3^7
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:17:32 -0000

Melinda,
You are right, animation will not help much there. May be a little. When I also took a look on last twist, in a half of second I understood that it was twist of "main bottom" face in direction from "main center" face/dimension to "secondary right". Well, may be understanding that was "main bottom" face took a little longer. But it’s good when cube is almost solved. To understand twist on the scrambled cube will take much more time - I should look for cubies that changed position and try to push them to the center face, then it’ll be possible to find the direction of twist. But if you want to solve cube, you don’t need it. Start from only 1C and 2C visible, and then, goind from stage to stage you will see more about twists and cubies behavior. And this is one of few parts of solving that is really exciting. Most of it is very boring.
With 4D - it was very difficult for me to predict twists of simplex-3. Especially when I fought for the shortest solve :) What sticker and with what combination of digits should I click to perform that "double transposition" of this "large" (2-layers) corner? More problems will be with {3,3}x{},3 (tetrahedron prism?) - there is very restricted set of twists and very distorted 3D projection… I think it will be one of most difficult puzzles. And I don’t see ways to {3,3,3} 4 and 5 now - but it’s only techincal problems.
Yes, I think that it will be interesting to describe stages of this adventure. First, I can say that my methods for 3^4 were totally useless for higher dimensions, but with 3^5 I was lucky to find sequence of macros that works for any 3^N (N>3). And after that the only problem was understanding of navigation in 7D - and optimization of everithing (but not macros, they are fine) :)
The rest will be next time )))

Andrey
— In 4D_Cubing@yahoogroups.com, Melinda Green <melinda@…> wrote:
>
> Andrey,
>
> I opened your log file in MC7D and undid one move. I hit redo and undo
> several times trying to understand how that last twist worked and I
> completely failed. Maybe it would help if the twists were animated but
> maybe not even then. Fooling with it I imagine that I feel much like one
> of my friends must feel when I show them MC4D for the first time. I kind
> of know what I’m looking at but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me
> yet. I think that I feel the same way about MC5D.
>
> I’m definitely comfortable with all of the 4D puzzles and I have a good
> sense about how the difficulty can go down as the number of faces goes
> up but that’s different from the extra "room" that you get with each new
> dimension which I have less of an intuitive feeling about. I also think
> that it’s interesting that as the number of faces goes down that puzzles
> get harder but only to a point. After that they seem to get easier
> again. I think that we’ve wondered before about which puzzle has the
> most difficulty for its size. I’m not sure whether there’s a good metric
> for that concept but for me it is probably the original 3D Rubik’s cube,
> or possibly the Skeweb <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skewb>. or other
> small 3D puzzle.
>
> I’m betting that a lot of members would like to hear more about your
> latest conquest. I know that I’d like to hear as much about how you felt
> during the experience than I would about your technical approach and
> techniques. I’m interested in both aspects but I would especially like
> to hear more about how this puzzle is different than lower-dimensional
> ones. Like the concept of there being more freedom and how to use that
> freedom. And more about your misplaced 6C cubies, that sort of thing.
> You’re the only person so far to climb this peak and return alive so I’d
> like to hear more about the trip up and the view from the top. Whatever
> you care to describe.
>