Cubology
March 4th 2008 -
Dr. Leanne Rylands, the very cool head of CS at the University of Western Sydney, gave a talk at work a couple of weeks ago. It was about her experiences as a woman in science/engineering, and was very interesting (apparently the University of Western Sydney has about 30% women undergraduates, which is about the level when a minority group stops feeling as much a minority) particulary as it reflected Veronica’s experiences and concerns.
At the end of the talk, she talked about her abiding fascination with Rubik’s cubes (nothing to do with her talk, just something she was interested in, and something people wanted to hear). She conveyed her enthusiasm so well that I subsequently gushed about it to Veronica and Kat, and Kat bought me a cube for my birthday.
So, for the past two weeks I’ve been messing about with a cube. Mr. McLeish is a rather skilled cubologist and has been helping me out. What fascinates me is that there are methods out there that use almost no “programmed” sequences – you can solve the entire thing using logic. When I was growing up, I had a cube or two, and I always got frustrated with them and pulled them apart. It seemed to me when I read about solutions that they tended to be magical solutions, algorithms that people have worked out through trial and error, such that when the cube is in such-and-such a state, you apply such-and-such a series of moves. Boring. And not true! While there are many techniques that are the aforementioned, the Heise method is quite cool, though not terribly well explained on the linked website.
Marco Says:
March 8th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
I used to solve the rubik’s cube back in late primary early high school. Recently Nik got a Rubik’s cube and I started to learn the petrus method and it was considerably more efficient than the methods I learnt 25 years previously. My all-time speed record is still unchanged, however, at 70 seconds :(
admin Says:
March 10th, 2008 at 8:46 am
The Petrus method and the Heise method are really similar – actually, I started on the Petrus method! But I disliked the memorised sequences on the final face, so I moved to the Heise method, which is more about giving you the tools to work out the sequences yourself.