Message #3486

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Re: New permutation puzzles in mind
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 22:04:19 -0700

I understand. I suspect that many of the new members we just got are
unfamiliar with Magic Tile and maybe not many of the popular physical
ones either. There are curvy 3D puzzles like this one
<http://www.twistypuzzles.com/cgi-bin/puzzle.cgi?pkey=5280>. They never
seemed to appeal to me, especially the puzzle balls
<http://www.twistypuzzles.com/images/spotlight/ballb.jpg>, but all of
these are perfectly legitimate puzzles. Come to think of it, I may have
been initially put off by all the cutting circles in MT but the number
of incredible puzzles Roice managed to implement with this design is
truly amazing, and his graphics have such a lovely look and feel.

Let me call your attention to some of the fairly easy ones that I’ve
enjoyed. These are the pure edge-turning ones in the "Euclidean" branch
of its puzzle tree. I find the ones labeled "Harlequin" particularly
pleasant because I like using only intuition and the most basic
commutator. It’s funny but I just searched for physical puzzles that are
purely edge-turning and didn’t find any. Anyone know of any? The
vertex-turning one linked above is the closest I could find.

You can then find increasingly difficult puzzles like that or move to
more beautiful ones that implement higher-dimensional puzzles with
corner and face pieces, etc. Here’s the main MT
<http://www.gravitation3d.com/magictile/> page for reference.

-Melinda

On 7/24/2016 6:47 PM, llamaonacid@gmail.com [4D_Cubing] wrote:
>
>
> Thanks for the links. I have not seen the Merger cubes before. Looks
> interesting.
>
> I like Magic Tile but I am not very used to pieces that have curves.
> The regular Rubik’s Cube and Megaminx are the only 3D puzzles I have
> solved.