<p>We seem to have had a lot of puzzle threads lately, so out of curiosity.. .. Is anyone else here into cubing?</p>
<p>i solve it when i'm bored.... does that count?</p>
<p>I solve those number-slider puzzles.. the ones with 15 numbered tiles and one blank space. I can solve the first 8 tiles in seconds.. the last 7 take a while though.</p>
<p>I once tried to solve the rubiks cube... but then i wrote a computer program to solve any given case. It was cool, and in 3D. Can't find it now... I think I might have deleted it :(</p>
<p>I had one when I was small, I broke it and rebuilt it correctly. Gotta love lateral thinking. :)</p>
<p>what algorithm did you use if you couldn't do it in real life?</p>
<p>The stickers. Just take the stickers off.</p>
<p>The stickers didn't come off nicely. Believe me, I tried.</p>
<p>Bruteforce maybe? :p
Try every combination until done.
btw he didnt say he couldnt do it in real life :confused:</p>
<p>ahh bruteforcing will totally not work, the cube has something like "43,252,003,274,489,856,000" possible states according to wikipedia (although I think the number of states a solvable cube can be in is a few orders less).<br>
I tried writing a program to randomly spin the cube untill it solves it, after a few trillion spins it still wasn't solved!</p>
<p>the algorthims people use to solve cubes widely vary, some of the easy ones will take 100 steps (but they're very logical and make sense). But one of the best is the The Two-Phase-Algorithm algorithm which can get a 20 move solution to most cubes with just a few seconds of computation! although it does require a few large tables. There are smart ways to finding the "perfect" solution to a cube as well, those can take a few hours and usually end up being 16 to 17 moves.</p>
<p>and if you don't like math or computers, JUST RIPE THE CUBE APART!! it's really fun to put it back together! =)</p>
<p>Rubik's club drives me insane...but it's oh so fun at the same time! I'm in the process of figuring it out....</p>
<p>ditto, amrik, on the sticker thing. they don't peel off too nicely.</p>
<p>there's a technique that you can use. At camp, my friend tried to teach it to me. I had too little patience, but she can complete a messed up one in 50 seconds or less.</p>
<p>It was a sort of *****ty mash of Greedy Algorithm, Genetic Algorithm, and Neural Networks... I like Neural Networks. I think I use them too much though. </p>
<p>No it didn't solve every configuration, but it could solve a lot of em. It was pretty good at getting to a certain point though.</p>
<p>I think if I study how people suggest solving it, I can write a better program.</p>
<p>Initially the idea was that it was an aid, in that you would try and solve it, except you had unlimited redo/undo, and could build tree style views.</p>
<p>Looking back at the C(C as in Crappy Code) source, I don't exactly understand exactly what I did... probably because there aren't any comments :) and it is uber optimized by hand.</p>
<p>BTW, I have never solved the Rubiks cube... I always started thinking about writing a program that could do it for me.</p>
<p>I'm with mercury, I love those slider puzzles. The Rubik's cube, however, has repeatedly kicked my ***. I couldn't even pull the stickers off right</p>
<p>
[quote]
ahh bruteforcing will totally not work
[/quote]
Yes chris I know... hence the :p smiley. :)</p>
<p>There are numerous methods of solving...</p>
<p>The one I use is fairly straight forward and only requires knowledge of four "special" moves. It takes me a few minutes to do it though, so I don't think mine is a great speed one.</p>
<p>Yeah, sagar, I didn't think someone could write a program to solve one unless they knew how to by hand. As has been said, brute force is just insane, hehe.</p>
<p>oh...smilieys.....such subtleties are beyond me! but actually I was just sorta illustrating why you have the smiley for those that might not understand =P</p>
<p>I used to play with Rubik's cubes a lot...not anymore though. A kid who's currently a freshman at Cornell got me interested.</p>
<p>Emmittisgod: remember my old one took minutes to solve it, and we are talking about a computer here. </p>
<p>I am actually recoding it now. Just google how to solve rubiks cube, and you have lots of tutorials.</p>