Message #1893

From: Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Re: yet more new puzzles and a prize
Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2011 12:46:22 -0500

About hidden global orientation of the ET {3,7} and other puzzles, the
"reset view" feature of the program allows the user to cheat on this.
First note the unscrambled colors with a reset view - white triangle is in
the center, blue to the left of it, etc. Then if you begin your solve with
a reset view as well, you can safely start solving the white to the center,
blue to the left, and so on. This cheat helps a little in that you can
observe the pattern of colors rather than having to deduce it.

Thank you for the observations on these puzzles. I thought they’d be
difficult, but I must say I didn’t realize how difficult when I made the
challenge! I will start thinking some about how to do macros and piece
finding. Macros should be interesting, in particular figuring out how the
user will specify the relative position/orientation to apply them
arbitrarily in the hyperbolic plane.

Cheers,
Roice

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 8:00 PM, schuma <mananself@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> I finally got a computer that can run MagicTile v2 preview. Knowing that
> the challenge is still open, I looked into the three {3,7} puzzles. I
> wonder if anyone is attempting these puzzles. After spending several
> minutes playing, I have the following thoughts.
>
> VT is obviously the easiest. The main difficulty is that, there are too
> many colors. 56 colors, right? Sometimes I’m embarrassed because I can’t
> find the piece I need. Sometimes I thought I found a desired piece. But
> only when I moved it to the destination, I found the colors were actually
> different. Because of this difficulty, the puzzle is not as easy as it
> should be. But still, it’s not hard. It just takes a little bit more time.
> By the way, under the default color setting, there are two blue triangle
> (color 3 and color 33). They are identical colors and one should change one
> of them.
>
> ET is something serious. I quickly found all the 3-cycle algorithms. They
> are pretty short and easy to find. As far as I currently know, the
> difficulties may be:
> (1) Too many colors. Hard to find a piece.
> (2) Too many pieces, nearly 1000 pieces. Tedious.
> (3) Hidden global orientation. This is tricky. In the beginning one should
> not assume a triangle to be the white triangle and start solving. He/she
> needs to study the scrambled state, and deduce which triangle is the
> "white" triangle, which is the blue one etc. Then he/she can start solving
> based on the deduced "orientation". If you don’t do it in the beginning and
> make an arbitrary assumption, it’s probably wrong and you are going into a
> dead end. I met this issue on edge turning dodecahedra, e.g., Gelatinbrain
> 1.4.10. Brandon must know what I’m talking about.
>
> FT is even harder, because the 3-cycle algorithms seem to be longer than
> ET. So macros would be very helpful here. At this point I can’t tell if I’m
> patient enough to solve it or not. I guess one need approximately or more
> than 20 hours to solve it. I won’t attempt it before solving VT and ET.
>
> Nan
>