I was not an early devotee of the Rubik's Cube. My friends had had cubes for the better part of a year before I got one, but when I actually had one I was fascinated. I can still solve it reliably in less than two minutes, even with the creaky cube and creaky hands that I have now.

I bought a 4x4x4 cube when they came out, fascinated at least by the details of the physical mechanism. Never quite got my head around the best way to solve the four way cube, though... it was too easy to get the cube into states that are impossible with the three way one, such as one side being flipped.

Thanks to my wonderful wife, I now have a 5x5x5 cube. I didn't even know they had made these until we saw it in a toy shop a few weeks ago. I demurred at buying it for myself, but Jen bought one as a pre-flight gift.

It's fun.

I don't know how to solve it yet, but it is a delightful piece of puzzle hardware.

Playing with it reminds me that I wrote a cube simulator on my Amstrad CPC over twenty years ago. It supported variable dimensions so you could manipulate a cube as large as you liked on the screen. The actual UI was pretty bad, as I remember, but it had the beginnings of a cube manipulation language built in that I think would be worth resurrecting - and this time I know about recursive descent parsing so I will handle nested expressions properly.

Having this physical artefact also makes me recall that I never wrote a cube solver. I doubt it would be easy to generalise a solver into higher dimensions, but it is definitely something I want to play with.

Software is ace. Thinking about this stuff makes me smile.

Posted by Dunx at April 21, 2008 12:52 PM