Message #1693

From: Andrey <andreyastrelin@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: 16-cell FT solved
Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 20:49:59 -0000

Nan, congratulations with this solve!
Nice to see that somebody beat me in my program :)
I started with 24-cell, and now struggling with central 2C pieces - without macros - just to understand the geometry of the puzzle. And pieces often go in the wrong places - so probably I don’t see all connections between cells.
As for incomplete orbits of stickers - it’s a property of many puzzles: FTO, cell-turn douprisms, cell-turn bitruncated 4D simplex, and probably a lot of others. I thought that 24-cell will have three sets of cells, but it’s not the case.

In next version I’ll do checkboxes for 10 or 12 ranks of stickers.
Are there any ideas what new puzzles to include in it? Better from tesseract/cross or 24-cell families - now I’m not ready to calculate irrational coordinates of axes of simplex or 600-cell…

Good luck!
Andrey

— In 4D_Cubing@yahoogroups.com, "schuma" <mananself@…> wrote:
>
> Here is my story of solving the 16-cell:
>
> When Andrey posted MPUlt v0.1, I was impressed by the images. I decided to try one of the puzzles once the macro function was available. I chose the 16-cell because it had relatively less colors. I love 24-cell but really hate distinguishing 24 colors. I cannot even name more than 10 major colors. At that time I studied the types of pieces in the 16-cell. But I didn’t start looking for algorithms.
>
> When Andrey posted MPUlt v0.2, the macro function was available. An actual solve became feasible for me. So I began to look for algorithms. One of the biggest breakthrough in searching for algos is, to find a convenient viewpoint. I don’t like the default view of 16-cell, where I can only see eight cells. I found that using ctrl+left click to center a cell gave a perfect viewpoint. So I setup my 3-cycle algorithms in that viewpoint. The second breakthrough is that I realized all 16 cells can be grouped into two groups. A sticker belonging to a group-A cell never goes to a group-B cell. So we don’t need 16 very different colors. We only need eight very distinct colors. And for the other eight I use the darker versions of the same colors. It took me some time to customize the colors. "Viewpoint" and "color pattern", two important things. Last night I worked very late and found algorithms needed to solve the small pieces around corners. Those are the hard part. I apparently missed the usual time to bed. The result is I couldn’t fall asleep till 5am. I don’t know if it’s excitation of the new puzzle or not.
>
> Today Andrey posted MPUlt v0.3, which made my study of inner pieces much easier. But even without v0.3 I was planning to solve it within one or two days. In the 16-cell there are nine types of pieces. So six levels of rank cannot fully separate all nine types. In "rank 5+" there are three types of pieces, which leads to some difficulty seeing the inner corner pieces.
>
> Finally it was the actual solve, which took 3 hours and 24 minutes in total. It was not painful.
>
> Andrey, thank you for making this puzzle. Excellent piece of work!
>
> Nan
>
> — In 4D_Cubing@yahoogroups.com, "schuma" <mananself@> wrote:
> >
> > Hi everyone
> >
> > I’ve just solved 16-cell FT (cell-turning) using Andrey’s MPUlt 0.3. The log file can be found here:
> > <http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/4D_Cubing/files/Nan%20Ma/>
> >
> > Phew…
> >
> > MUUlt is really great! For a puzzle of this size, I can’t imagine a better experience. All the turning and macros are one-click. I can use macro when defining another macro, and so on.
> >
> > Nan
> >
>