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Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

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31–40 of 135 posts

Re: Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

#31
post #14

At some point though, how many states is too many ? We have massive housing affordability and employment shortage problems, meanwhile here’s a tech elite flouting 4x10^9 states which he doesn’t pay taxes on and most of them will not even get used. Is that really fair?

It's actually about 4x10^19 (exponent 19, not 9).

Typo, but this just shows the extreme inequity when one cube amasses so many states.

Re: Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

#38
post #23

[flagged]

With all due respect to Steve, under 1 minute isn't that impressive. You can get there just by doing the beginner's method (a handful of different move-sequences) rapidly. The people who really study Rubik's Cube algorithms in depth can do it in a few seconds.

I remember a TV program showing someone breaking the one minute record for the first time. I could already do it at that point, I'm sure many others could as well.

Re: Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

#39

Reminds me of a book I recently read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_Stay_in_Hell The numbers produced by permutations are astounding! Especially compared to the (much smaller) numbers in our actual physical universe.

My favorite one is chess games. If you managed to compress each chess game down to just a single atom, the physical size of a disk to save this data would exceed the amount of atoms in the universe. Even the number of theoretic positions (ignoring legality/possibility) is just below the number of atoms in the universe.

Though it must be said that once one starts looking at permutations of things, the number of atoms in the universe seems quite small indeed. 10^80? What's that, like 7 or 8?

Re: Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very curious about your other favorites it does but have.

My kids had a science battle in the basement last summer, which resulted in both their Rubik’s Cubes colliding mid air. They both exploded (the cubes, not the kids) and were reassembled at a “fix this before mom finds us” rush speed. I think my favourite is this pattern my 9 year old makes on “Greeny” (that’s his pet name for the cube that now has 11 green squares) where all four top corners are red/white/blue.

This here is the difference between theory and practice. Our minds are to feeble to understand reality.
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