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Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states
- cr125rider 2mo agoI love this. Excellent weird internet thing.
- Waterluvian 2mo agoAh nice, it has some of my favourites!
- r4ndomname 2mo agoI am very curious about your other favorites it does but have.
- Waterluvian 2mo agoMy 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.
- tgv 2mo agoThis here is the difference between theory and practice. Our minds are to feeble to understand reality.
- bambax 2mo agoWhen I was a kid (many, many moons ago) I found a solved Rubik's Cube in a house where we were staying. I played with it and soon enough couldn't put it back in its solved state. So I took it apart and rebuilt it 'properly', which didn't take long and wasn't too hard. I wonder how many people did the same.
- tsoukase 2mo agoMy kid wanted to jump 3x3x3 and go directly to a 4 cube. I freaked out when we messed it and thought we could never solve it, because you can't disassemble a 4 cube into pieces like a 3 one. In the end it's not so difficult: like a 3 as you move around the two middle pieces of each edge together like one.
- netvarun 2mo agoWow, this was really fun to play around with! Amazing execution and launch! Quick feedback: it’d be great if the page updated when the URL changes, so you can explore different positions without reloading. Right now, if I change the URL/hash of the cube position (eg: incrementing by 1 https://everycube.alen.is/?view=3d#5319001606686939024 https://everycube.alen.is/?view=3d#5319001606686939024 ), the app doesn’t update and I have to open the new URL in a separate tab to see the new position. [Chrome 150 on Mac OS X 10.15.7]
- Alen123 2mo agojust shipped a fix, the app now listens for hash/URL changes and updates the view without needing a reload. thanks for catching this!
- PaulHoule 2mo agoReminds me of that time when, as an undergraduate, my "team" entered a Problem Solving Competition and couldn't choose one of the two problems so we did both in parallel. One of us wrote a program in BASIC on a Tandy 1000 that the rest of us estimated would take more than a google years to finish, but he wasn't be dissuaded and let it run the whole weekend. I made an analysis that was mostly correct but was off by a factor of four because I mistook a radius for a diameter.
- jcims 2mo agoMy scroll wheel covers about 12 states per inch of travel. Did the stubby pencil work and it would take about 9.5 years to scroll through them all if the wheel surface was moving at the speed of light.
- soupspaces 2mo agoAuto rotate and auto scrolling would be neat. Edit: also 2D https://www.github.com/AdamWhiteHat/RubiksCubeControlWpf https://www.github.com/AdamWhiteHat/RubiksCubeControlWpf
- owlninja 2mo agoI clicked the button on my Logitech M720 mouse to free spin, spun the wheel like I was on the Price is Right, and got to 791,001!
- jcims 2mo agoLove my Logitech free-wheeling mouse wheels! Not having a heavy wheel and detent-free option is a non-starter for me.
- soupspaces 2mo ago791K? Those are rookie numbers. Get yourself a can of compressed air and you'll be pushing millions.
- donkeylazy456 2mo agoliterally doom scrolling
- Alen123 2mo agohaha healthiest possible doom scroll though
- venera22 2mo ago[dead]
- khazhoux 2mo agoAt 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?
- DerekL 2mo agoIt's actually about 4x10^19 (exponent 19, not 9).
- cuoder 2mo agoNon-AI posts be like
- nzealand 2mo agoIt took Ernő Rubik four years to develop the cube. He immediately scrambled it, then spent the next month figuring out if it could be solved. Luckily no one told him there were 43 quintillion valid combinations.
- avandekleut 2mo agoSolved theoretically? I figure you could at least intuit that reversing all the moves in the scramble in reverse order would solve it.
- zamadatix 2mo agoThe above makes everything sound very intentionally done towards the end result. He came about making the cube for finding ways to tackle the engineering challenge of building a device which moves in such levels if freedom, ended up scrambling it, and then spent a month figuring out how to treat the scrambled state as a puzzle to be solved. Messing with it gave him insight into just how complex a puzzle it was and the rest goes from there.
- nzealand 2mo agoHe spent the next month coming up with an algorithm to solve it, not knowing if such an algorithm was even possible. After he sold the puzzle, he traveled around to various conferences, to prove it could be solved.
- richstokes 2mo agoFirst thought; this could be turned into a really cool password generator
- zetanor 2mo agoSweet, can I mint these as NFTs? I don't know how to multiply 43252003274489856000 by 50 USD but I think it could make me a lot of money, and I like money.
- HPsquared 2mo agoThat's more money than there is in the universe, I think you're onto a winner here!
- sail0rm00n 2mo agoIf we can capture even 1% of the market…
- hahahaa 2mo agoYou only need to sell one at $50, then market cap does the rest and you are boundlessly rich.
- philipallstar 2mo agoAnd then countless politicians will blame you for not paying for everything out of your market cap.
- anticorporate 2mo agoMore like countless CEOs will claim that having to pay taxes on that wealth will destroy society, despite no jobs being created to make the product and the product itself have zero value to society.
- philipallstar 2mo agoWell yes, you shouldn't pay tax on that, and it would cause huge problems. If your house increases in theoretical value should you pay tax on the increase? Or only when you sell the house?
- snowwrestler 2mo agoReminds me of a book I recently read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_Stay_in_Hell 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.
- somenameforme 2mo agoMy 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?
- notpushkin 2mo agoThe number of permutations of n distinct objects is n!. So, probably a bit more than 8, since 8! < 10⁸, but I don’t think you are terribly off :-) Edit: 58! < 10⁸⁰ < 59!
- purplemoonx 2mo ago[flagged]
- eurleif 2mo agoWith 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.
- purplemoonx 2mo agoHahah what are you doing here??? I had a friend - David - he could do it insanely quick. He's basically who I am thinking of in my post since he was also a genius at guitar, and could play beautifully. And he taught me basic PHP. We spent a lot of time on your site on random Friday nights (him playing guitar) hahah, good times. More of a yo-yo guy myself. I could walk the dog, pendulum, what-have-you. Around the world if I'm feeling saucy Also: Gross, wtf happened to it???? If you can't say publicly, just blink 3 times
- tonyedgecombe 2mo agoI 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.
- purplemoonx 2mo ago[dead]
- opan 2mo ago>How did the kid who could solve the Rubik's Cube in under 1 min not become an algorithm designer - some genius backend dev? Somebody else figured out the algs. The speedcubers just rote memorize them and then practice becomes mostly about execution. (Oversimplifying a little, but I have gotten sub-60 myself with the Roux method a few years ago) Interestingly I've never managed to pick up programming but learned the cube pretty well (as an adult), and my programmer friend can't seem to figure out the cube at all even with me giving him extra help on top of linking materials I learned from. I suspect it's a very different skillset and we're both weak in one area.
- jordanarseno 2mo agostructure emerges from chaos at 23,738,673,083,197,685,761 & 34,677,398,788,068,093,945
- bambax 2mo agoTrue! How did you spot this though? Did you look at every possible position?!?
- mlni 2mo agoI bet they entered the scramble U2 D2 R2 L2 F2 B2 or something to that effect. My 9yo loves this pattern.
- jordanarseno 2mo agouser mlni is right. I can solve a cube IRL, and these patterns are easily derivable from the solved state with only a few twists. There is an R' button in the upper right that let's the user enter scramble commands, so I manually entered them, and landed on these Permutation IDs.
- bambax 2mo agoExcellent! Thanks for the info!
- DonHopkins 2mo agoTook me a hell of a lot more moves than that (30 septendecillion) for structure to emerge from chaos with paperclips. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html Universal Paperclips • a game by Frank Lantz • combat programming by Bennett Foddy 'Riversong' by Tonto's Expanding Headband used by kind permission of Malcolm Cecil > © 2017 Everybody House Games I Paperclips: 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
- Mathsystem 2mo ago[flagged]
- jocelyner 2mo ago[dead]
- skcurf 2mo agoCool!
- skcurf 2mo agocool!
- kazinator 2mo agoOK. So I put the slider into a random middle location. Then I zipped it back all the way left as fast as I could. Still not up to competitive speed cubing level! Shucks, golly, gee.
- sensecall 2mo agoWouldn't it be cool to click and then see the quickest solution and it rotates in front of you, or a sequence of moves to solve.
- Aoi_Asahina 2mo ago[dead]
- ajkjk 2mo agowell that's just like, your coordinate system, man
- noduerme 2mo agoI wrote a 3d rubiks cube slot machine for my old online casino. It scrambled the cube randomly 4 times and gave the player 60 seconds to solve it by twisting up to 3 times. Lots of weird quaternion math to handle the spinning and shift key twisting at the same time. All with simple geometry in Away3D / AS3. The real hard part of designing that game was creating the payout structure. The game paid an equal amount for each "line" of 3 colors in a row on any face after the player made their third move. There was a progressive take and jackpot for a perfect solution. And I specifically wanted to target a zero house edge for the game, to reward the best problem solvers. So the question was, given 4 random twists off a perfect cube, what are the individual chances of getting 64, 63, 62...1 lines of sequential color given the best 3 spins from the initial random state, and then hiw to allocate the payout structure accordingly. Probably a billion monte carlo runs and I had a pay table. It was lots of fun. I wish more gambling games rewarded skill that way.
- divbzero 2mo agoCasino games are rarely zero house edge. Is there a way you signaled this feature to problem solvers? Did the game prove to be successful?
- tancop 2mo agoit could be a video game with no real money, and some online casinos have zero edge games where you pay a small fee when you win.
- huflungdung 2mo ago[dead]
- crucio 2mo agoany time there is skill in an online casino game where money is involved, there is cheating too
- DonHopkins 2mo agoJust change the parity by swapping two stickers on a corner piece, and no amount of skill can solve it.
- tkocmathla 2mo agoIt would be really funny, and sociopathic, if every state change registered as a browser history entry so I had to click Back 50,000 times to get back to Hacker News.
- russum 2mo agoOh wow, you don’t do “Open in New Tab” when reading HN? Thanks for the idea, I should really try that, maybe it will help with my infinite open tabs problem.
- maxlin 2mo agoI think you missed at least a few, can you re-check through them?
- idorube 2mo agoBut, why?
- lee337 2mo ago[flagged]
- pestatije 2mo agothis does permutations of pieces position and orientation would be cool permutations of moves instead...the visuals would be especially interesting to have as a raw Rubik's simulator
- Aoi_Asahina 2mo ago[dead]
- m4tthumphrey 2mo agoThis is very satisfying to play with, top work!
- monxer 2mo agoThis is pretty cool. Same concept (and I would assume implementation) as https://everyuuid.com/ https://everyuuid.com/ Implementation details can be found here: https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/ https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/
- olek1983 2mo agoThere are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (~4.3 × 10¹⁹) different positions. 1. If I try every position (1 position/sec) knowing it's unique, it will take me 1.37 trillion years. 2. If the pro tries (let's say 10 positions/sec), it will take 137 billion years. The universe is younger than that. :-D Wondering how fast the machine or computer will do that?
- Spare_account 2mo agoHere is another way of looking at the same question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252106
- ostacke 2mo agoReminds me of https://everyuuid.com/ https://everyuuid.com/
- theginger 2mo agoAnyone else surprised how small the number is? It looks quite big without commas but if you add them in it looks like the sort of number that is almost conceivable 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 43 quintillion, that's the type of number i've vaguely heard of. Compared to the number of possibilities for a shuffled deck of cards 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,804,000,000,000,000 Thats a big number, and weirdly I think those 00s at the end are exact not a rounding error.
- xboxnolifes 2mo agoIt felt pretty big to me, considering Rubik's cubes only have 26 pieces, their valid slots are not all the same, and some of their states are mirrored.
- BurningFrog 2mo agoIt's really 21, since the centers are all one unmovable piece. https://jhodileongseportfolio.weebly.com/center-faces.html https://jhodileongseportfolio.weebly.com/center-faces.html
- xboxnolifes 2mo agoGood catch, forgot about that.
- BurningFrog 2mo agoAnd yet sorting a deck of cards is much easier than solving the cube. 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 is a fun trivia number, but it tells you nothing about how hard it is to solve the cube.
- Polizeiposaune 2mo agoCurrent speed cube record appears to be 2.76s. Has anyone ever sorted a randomly shuffled deck of cards in under 3 seconds?
- 2mo ago
- dcanelhas 2mo agoThis is a nice visualization. Are there any keyboard keys to just advance one position along the line? I tried the arrow keys but they jumped quite far. I don't know how this was generated (BFS and flattening?) it seems adjacent indices aren't just one move apart ... but they could be! There is a Hamiltonian circuit for Rubik's cube: https://bruce.cubing.net/ham333/rubikhamiltonexplanation.html https://bruce.cubing.net/ham333/rubikhamiltonexplanation.htm... Following the circuit would be like Gray codes instead of binary digits. You only flip one bit at a time when going to the next number.
- philipwhiuk 2mo agoYou can change the jump-amount in the top right. (500 was an odd default).
- dcanelhas 2mo agoFor me that step-size only works to affect the jumps given by the mouse scroll wheel. The keyboard arrow keys (Left and Down) also seem to do some scrolling after you have selected the number line. However, both arrows produce steps in the decreasing direction. The difference between two successive steps by pressing a key seems to be 86504006548979
- arealaccount 2mo ago> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). On ios Firefox and Safari unfortunately, would love to see this site
- danhardman 2mo agoWhat's the correct way to sort a Rubik's Cube state?
- amelius 2mo agoMaybe show the minimum number of moves required to solve each state :) And maybe sort them by "distance to solved".
- pama 2mo agoApplication error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). iPhone; Safari; Lockdown mode.
- t0mek 2mo agoI used the "FX" option and I think there's a bug. The center tiles on each side always stay in the same position.
- wingmanjd 2mo agoOn a Rubiks cube, the center tile always remains constant. I was surprised at this when I accidentally broke one apart to find a static 3d cross piece to each cube face (e.g. a non-moving tile). Everything else rotates around it
- Etheryte 2mo agoThe center tiles on a Rubik's cube don't move, they only rotate in place.
- nuancebydefault 2mo agoI think you thought a /s can be sometimes implied in HN comments
- krisraven 2mo agoI came to this comment because I was also thinking that this was a bug. Interesting to know this is by design.
- yigalirani 2mo agonice, now sort the list in some interesting way
- twright 2mo agoThe moves are reversed? i.e., F is F' https://everycube.alen.is/?view=3d&alg=R%20U%20R%27%20U%27 https://everycube.alen.is/?view=3d&alg=R%20U%20R%27%20U%27 Should be: https://alg.cubing.net/?alg=R_U_R-_U- https://alg.cubing.net/?alg=R_U_R-_U-
- tantalor 2mo agoThe color interpolation in 2D mode is bad. Instead of interpolating through RGB, you should use OKLCH Demo: https://jsfiddle.net/t80eLfc2/2/ https://jsfiddle.net/t80eLfc2/2/ Interpolating in RGB just uses linear interpolation on each channel, so it ends up passing through grey in a lot of cases, and the colors look very desatured. Interpolating in OKLCH preserves chroma and instead passes through different hues.
- anony-123 2mo agoIs your mercor.com site works really?
- michaelfallon 2mo agoExponential growth is always mind boggling! Crazy to think there are that many states.
- unprovable 2mo agoAh great, so now I've got the choice to "Complete he Rubik's cube"... it'll just take 432520032 times as long as completing today's Instagram...