Message #3501

From: bodorb11@freemail.hu
Subject: New member- introduction
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2016 13:25:00 -0700

Hello, my name is Bertalan Bodor. I managed to solve the 3^4 Rubik’s Cube a few day ago, and was suggested to write a brief introduction about myself, so here we go.

Some basic information: I am 25 years old, I live in Pécs, Hungary, and I am a mathematician.

About my studies: I finished my Master’s degree in pure mathematics last year at ELTE, Budapest. I will start my PhD studies (also in pure mathematics) in this October in Dresden, Germany, where Manuel Bodirsky will be my supervisor. The topics I’m interested in (within Maths) are algebra, model theory, and computer science.

Some of my (not very usual) hobbies:

Rubik’s Cube (how surprising:)): I started cubing about 10 years ago, I went to my first official competition in 2007, and since then I attended several competitions. Until about 2010 it was my main hobby, I was cubing a lot, and I was pretty enthusiastic about it. After that I sort of lost my interest in cubing, also I had less free time due to my university activities. Despite this I have never completely lost my interest in cubing, sometimes I’m still practising and I still go to some competitions. My 3x3 average now is around 12 seconds. (You can check all my official results on the WCA website).

Juggling: I started to juggle in 2010, I think. Now I can juggle 5 balls and I can do several tricks with fewer balls. It is a good thing, and I guess I could be much better, but sometimes I’m just too lazy to practise:(.

Minesweeper: I am doing this since 2009, I think, although I had an almost two-year break (2013-2015). Currently I’m in the top 150 in the world ranking. (You can check my result on the appropriate website as well…)

I was also told to write something about my experiences with the 3^4 puzzle. Well, I first encountered this puzzle when I started cubing, and I remember that back then I didn’t understand how it works and I thought this puzzle was pretty much impossible to solve. Later I didn’t encounter this puzzle for a while, however sometimes I heard that some of friends solved it (or at least tried to). Then about a week ago I came upon to Mathologer’s introduction video about the puzzle. (Funny enough I already heard about him earlier, because he is juggling too, and he wrote a book about the mathematical background of juggling.) After watching his videos I thought that maybe the 3^4 cube is not that difficult, and I also heard about this "Hall of Fame" thing, so I decided to try to solve it. For the solution I wrote my own macros using Mathologer’s ideas. The whole solution took me about 3 days for the first time including writing all the macros I was using, and it was about 7000 moves. I didn’t do any fancy things in the solution, I was just applying the commutators until everything got to its place (like in a blindsolve for the normal cube). After all, my opinion is that this puzzle is not very difficult (if you just want to solve it), you just have to get used to it, and it takes a lot of patience. It was a good experience, though, and I think I will try to solve some larger cubes in the near future, as well.