Message #1483

From: Andrey <andreyastrelin@yahoo.com>
Subject: Magic Tile - 3 colors, 7 layers solved.
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2011 07:35:58 -0000

There are 5 different 3-color puzzles that are implemented in Magic Tile, but they all are the same and equivalent to "hemi-cube" - a figure with 1 corner, 3 edges and 3 faces. As far as I know, it is the only nonorientable puzzle that is implemented for now.
Everybody can made it himself in material world: take Rubik’s cube, paint it in 3 colors and always do twists in pairs - rotate opposite faces in the same direction.

I don’t remember if I solved it before. May be yes. It’s very interesting
puzzle: it is nonorientable, very dense and has strange behaviour of pieces.
There may be parity problems on every layer: if you solve layer from inside,
you may find that two "diagonal" stickers are swapped, and you have to swap a
couple of "side" stickers and then restore them by "even" operations.

Result is 109 twists. It could be much better (below 20?), but I’ve solved it
by intuition only.

Andrey