roice - Slashdot User

Submission + - 4D analogue of Megaminx Puzzle (gravitation3d.com)

Submitted by

roice

on Tuesday May 13, 2008 @01:18AM

roice writes: "The crazy hypercubists who created the 4D and 5D Rubik's cubes (past Slashdot posts are here and here) have now developed a free working 4 dimensional software analogue of the Megaminx puzzle. Composed of 120 dodecahedral cells, the underlying structure is arguably the most beautiful of 4D geometrical shapes, with amazing symmetries and no analogue in dimensions higher than 4. Though some have already begun working on solutions for this "Hyperminx", it has yet to be solved by anyone. Also, when it comes to number of positions, it dwarfs the previous puzzles by many thousands of orders of magnitude!!"

Comment Re:Really 4D/5D? (Score 1) 171

by roice on Wednesday June 07, 2006 @09:51PM (#15491727) Attached to: A Working 5D Rubik's Cube

Yes, you could represent the 4D cube state textually too (I think this is what you are asking). However, the 4D cube does not have 27 sides (also called "faces"). It has 8 faces with 27 stickers per face, verses the 3D cube which has 6 faces with 9 stickers per face. So a textual representation of the 4D cube might be something like...

Face 1: (RRR/RRR/RRR)/(RRR/RRR/RRR)/(RRR/RRR/RRR)
Face 2: (GGG/GGG/GGG)/(GGG/GGG/GGG)/(GGG/GGG/GGG)

...
Face 8: (BBB/BBB/BBB)/(BBB/BBB/BBB)/(BBB/BBB/BBB)

And a twist would jump all the characters representing stickers from certain faces to others in a certain way. If we represent the puzzle in this way, a twist is probably more difficult to follow than the graphically projected representation of MagicCube4D though.

I've seen textual representations that try to mimick mathematical projecting down dimensions too. These are more complicated in their organization but still contain the same total number of characters representing all the different colored stickers.

Hope this helped answer your question.

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