Message #3318

From: liamjwright@btinternet.com
Subject: Introductions
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2016 01:32:27 -0700

Hey all,

My name is Liam, and I’m a 16 year old from the least beautiful part of Kent: Gravesend. As a 16 year old, I don’t really have much going for me yet, so I spend much of my spare time as an amateur programmer and geometric puzzle enthusiast, although I am hoping to move in to particle physics once I’m thrown out into the scary wide world. In the rest of my downtime, I’m an avid pokemon fan and PC gamer.

I always found geometry to be one of the more interesting parts of maths, so I suppose I was destined to find myself drowning in Rubiks cubes and other such puzzles. I started out in early 2014, when some evil child scrambled my 3x3. I couldn’t bear to have it sitting around all messed up, so I learned to solve it. I was pretty happy with it myself, and it provided a good bit of entertainment for my classmates, so I kept at it. Fast forward 8 months, and I’d reached sub-30. It was at this point I decided to halt the speedcubing, and moved onto other puzzles. I started with the Rubiks Revenge, which was a stiff, clunky pain in the backside that took forever to solve. From there I moved up to higher order knockoff cubes, then onto other shapes like the Megaminx. Most of my puzzles are cubic or shapemods, many of which I inherited from my mother, so I have a few cool, rare puzzles, but my pride and joy has to be my ghost cube, a gift from my now-ex.

I have no idea when I was introduced to the 4D cube. Probably years ago, long before I could even solve a 3x3. However, last Monday (28/03/16), I rediscovered it and found the 4D hall of fame. And it was in that moment that I was captured. One way or another, I was getting my name on that list. So, I sat down on that dark Monday night, and I started my quest. By the time I went to bed two hours later, I had a cross done,which really put into scope for me how different the 4D cube is to the 3D equivalent. The next day, I spent 8 hours grinding away at it. In the first 3, I finished the two colours, using mostly intuition and applying skills from the lower dimensional cubes. In the rest, I completed all but one cell’s worth of three colour pieces. The next day, I spent another 6 hours. By this point, I’d got into the swing of it, and it was just a grinding process of commutating and rotating. Then, after a grand total of 4503 moves, it was done.

I can’t say that I’d be able to solve it again off the back of my hand. I spent so long on it that by the time I’d finished, the first steps were all but forgotten. But it was an interesting experience. The guide on superliminal proved to be invaluable, but it did miss one extremely important detail: the dreaded 2-colour-piece parity. The half-hour I spent trying to fix that infernal parity with futile three-cycles was not fun at all. But aside from that, the guide was perfect, and the experience very fun.

Congratulations to all you brilliant folk who have completed this monster cube, and I am honoured to stand among you all!