Message #1158

From: schuma <mananself@gmail.com>
Subject: First week in 4D
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:00:42 -0000

Hi everyone,

It has been a week since I solved 3^4 and then joined this group. I’ve always been loving the 4D geometry. For example, my desktop wallpaper is an exploded view of the 120-cell, which was made by myself using Mathematica a few years ago. But this is the first time I actually play something in 4D. This is definitely a thrilling experience.

In this week I have solved the hypercubes from 2^4 to 5^4, and Simplex-2. Although I am only a beginner here, I would like to share some of my thoughts. Melinda, thank you for encouraging me to do it.

Sometimes I build long algorithms based on short algorithms. Unfortunately when I record a macro, it is not allowed to call another macro. Here is what I did. I created an empty log file, performed all the turns in the long algorithm including calling macros, and saved the log file. I went into the log file, copied the sequence of moves, pasted it into the macro file, and added certain information like the name of the new macro and reference stickers. I guess some people also do this. But I haven’t found discussion about it. Maybe that’s because I haven’t read much in the archived mails.

When I solved 4^4 and especially 5^4, it was very hard to see and distinguish 1C pieces. I really hope that I can toggle some buttons and choose to see only certain types of pieces, like only 1C pieces. I’ve seen someone talking the same thing, and I know it’s not trivial to add this feature. I would benefit a lot from this feature because my solution is type by type, not layer by layer. I found this feature in MC7D, but I don’t understand how to make a turn in MC7D yet.

So what’s next for me? I will not join the competition tomorrow because I don’t have time to prepare more macros and practice today. I don’t want to move to 5D yet, because I’m not ready for the challenge of another dimension. I’d like to stay in 4D. I like to play more regular polytopes. But it seems like among all six regular polytopes, only {4,3,3} and {3,3,3} can be found in MC4D. {5,3,3} is too daunting. Melinda has already warned me. {3,4,3} (24-cell) would be an interesting puzzle. Since it has no analog in all other dimensions. Even for tesseract, there are other ways to cut it. Like in 3D, we have Skewb or helicopter cube. I really hope some day I can play them.

Nan