Message #1089

From: Chris Locke <project.eutopia@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] New: Questions thread…
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:40:27 +0900

It’s more of a shortcut than anything really. For each face in 4D, there
are 24 possible twists (that includes the identity twist - i.e. the
do-nothing twist). There are three axis through each face, and if you label
a quarter-twist of the axes X, Y, Z respectively, then it turns out all the
possible twists can be built from a combination of these elementary twists.
The corner and edge twists are basically a combination of these fundamental
twists and are not necessary. They were added because we can use our 3D
intuition to see that it should be possible to twist along an axis that is
not the x, y, or z axis. Such rotation axes go through edge and corner
pieces, so it is added as an possible twist.

In 5D there are most definitely many ways of twisting a given face that are
simply defined by just 2c pieces, but there are basically 3 reasons why only
these are available. One, it is much harder for us to visualize a 4D face
to ‘see’ what possible ways you can twist it that are not the 2c fundamental
twists. Two, how one would allow the user to execute these twists in the
given interface is a difficult problem. Three, since all twists can be
built up by those fundamental 2c twists anyway, it is already a completely
operational 5D puzzle, and the additional twists would just make it possible
to push twist counts to lower values.

So yes, while it would be possible to implement such a feature, I imagine it
would have little pay-off and a lot of headache to implement. Besides,
extra overhead could possibly just end up cluttering the interface.

Hope what I’ve said is accurate. Let me know if I’ve made a mistake in my
observations.

Chris

2010/7/27 Jonathan Mecias <jonathan.mecias001@mymdc.net>

>
>
> Hmm good question. i want to know the answer too because im not 100% sure
> why you can rotate by clicking on corners and edges. Can any one elaborate
> on this?
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 5:23 PM, deustfrr <deustfrr@yahoo.ca> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Ok so, on MC5D and the 3D cube, you have face turns, but on MC4D, you can
>> rotate by clicking on corners and edges (corner&edge turns). Why is that
>> possible?
>> I think I asked over 9000 questions so I just made this thread
>>
>>
>
>