Thread: "Done again !!!"

From: "David Vanderschel" <DvdS@Austin.RR.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 20:02:32 -0000
Subject: Fwd: Re: [MC4D] Done again !!!



congratulations on capturing the last of the significant "firsts"
with a solution to the 5^4!!! and
without using macros even, or "bare-handed" as you so prosaically
call it. i've updated the hall-of-fame
page to include your accomplishment.

would one of you please run the twist-counting script on the
published log file? i've not been able to use
it successfully on this machine, so i just entered the total number
of operations which is of course too
high. still, eric's solution certainly required several thousand
twists, and as he says, should be quite
possible to beat. feel up to it roice? you're certainly our resident
expert on efficient cube solving.

thanks also for spotting my typos in your permutations page though i
don't know if i'd call it a "little"
mistake since the difference between 10^220 and 10^700 is rather
significant! i can't even imagine a way
to think about a number that large. can any of you think of a good
real world comparison? perhaps the
total number of possible human genomes? i guess that would be 4
choose 3x10^9 but i've not found a big
number calculator on the web yet.

well, congratulations again eric. i am forever in awe of you guys.
-melinda

p'tit bonhomme wrote:

> Hye everybody,
>
> Here are some news again,
>
> thanks you, melinda, to fix my english,
> it's sounds really better, as you wrote it,
>
> I did this quickly last time,I should have talked
> about rotations instead of positions on a place
> if you want I can try to improve my explanations,
> I'll let you know.
> May be, we just not talk about permutations, but
> about visibly different positions of the MC4D, because
> there is some others permutations, that I didn't count that
> doesn't visibly change the 4x4x4x4 and the 5x5x5x5
>
> I just notice a little mistake in the exposant of 10,
> in the approximations, you gave.
> you forgot that you were counting packs of 3 figures,
> it shoud be:
>
> 1.7 x 10^120 ; 1.3 x 10^344 ; 8.2 x 10^700
>
> But all this isn't the only reason, I send you this mail,
> You can find in attach, a beautifull little, bare-hand made, 5x5x5x5
> log file.
>
> By bare-hand, I mean no macro.
>
> I know that some of you guys, wanted to be first on it,
> sorry for that, by I know my solutions to be really long,
> I realise I could have done so many shortcuts, so it would
> be easy to do a shorter solutions.
>
> Thankq again, melinda
>
> :) Eric
--- End forwarded message ---




From: "David Vanderschel" <DvdS@Austin.RR.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 20:03:05 -0000
Subject: Fwd: Re: [MC4D] Done again !!!



congratulations on capturing the last of the significant "firsts"
with a solution to the 5^4!!! and
without using macros even, or "bare-handed" as you so prosaically
call it. i've updated the hall-of-fame
page to include your accomplishment.

would one of you please run the twist-counting script on the
published log file? i've not been able to use
it successfully on this machine, so i just entered the total number
of operations which is of course too
high. still, eric's solution certainly required several thousand
twists, and as he says, should be quite
possible to beat. feel up to it roice? you're certainly our resident
expert on efficient cube solving.

thanks also for spotting my typos in your permutations page though i
don't know if i'd call it a "little"
mistake since the difference between 10^220 and 10^700 is rather
significant! i can't even imagine a way
to think about a number that large. can any of you think of a good
real world comparison? perhaps the
total number of possible human genomes? i guess that would be 4
choose 3x10^9 but i've not found a big
number calculator on the web yet.

well, congratulations again eric. i am forever in awe of you guys.
-melinda

p'tit bonhomme wrote:

> Hye everybody,
>
> Here are some news again,
>
> thanks you, melinda, to fix my english,
> it's sounds really better, as you wrote it,
>
> I did this quickly last time,I should have talked
> about rotations instead of positions on a place
> if you want I can try to improve my explanations,
> I'll let you know.
> May be, we just not talk about permutations, but
> about visibly different positions of the MC4D, because
> there is some others permutations, that I didn't count that
> doesn't visibly change the 4x4x4x4 and the 5x5x5x5
>
> I just notice a little mistake in the exposant of 10,
> in the approximations, you gave.
> you forgot that you were counting packs of 3 figures,
> it shoud be:
>
> 1.7 x 10^120 ; 1.3 x 10^344 ; 8.2 x 10^700
>
> But all this isn't the only reason, I send you this mail,
> You can find in attach, a beautifull little, bare-hand made, 5x5x5x5
> log file.
>
> By bare-hand, I mean no macro.
>
> I know that some of you guys, wanted to be first on it,
> sorry for that, by I know my solutions to be really long,
> I realise I could have done so many shortcuts, so it would
> be easy to do a shorter solutions.
>
> Thankq again, melinda
>
> :) Eric
--- End forwarded message ---




From: "David Vanderschel" <DvdS@Austin.RR.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 20:06:23 -0000
Subject: Fwd: Re: [MC4D] Done again !!!



Hello all. I'm coming up for air now after several months working on
an intense but very enjoyable project at my job. I'm actually in
India right now. I've been here for a week. Three others from my
company came today and are all very jet-lagged. The four of us got to
talking about religion and then enlightenment, and one among us who is
not a mathematician mentioned that he has never tried this thought out
on a mathematician, but always felt that true enlightenment is the
ability to see in more than three dimensions. I'm not sure how
literally he meant this, but it lead to a discussion about our
favorite puzzle.

Now that everyone else is asleep (it's 9:30 p.m. here), so i decide
stay up a little longer and play with mc4d for the first time in over
two years. Before starting, I decided to catch up on mc4d email
including Eric's 5^4 solution. As requested, I've run the move
counting script. Eric's solution weighs in at 7,724 moves. I think
this must be why no one else has attempted it!

The last time I've played with the puzzle was in August, 2000 when I
had set out to beat Roice's record for shortest solution, but I
stopped working on it as a result of other aspects of life getting in
the way. (I wasn't likely to beat his sub-500-move solution anyway!)

In the mean time, my work situation has forced me to stop being a
UNIX-only person and to write some native Windows code. I'm still
very strongly UNIX-biased and in fact have done my Windows development
by porting my UNIX-based build environment to Windows using Cygwin
32. I am also using an excellent cross-platform GUI toolkit called
wxWindows. This allows me to write truly portable graphical
applications that work equally well under Linux and Windows and have
identical functionality. (There's actually nothing to restrict it
from running on other platforms as well, but those are the only ones
I've tested it on.)

I've had in the back of my mind for some time to try to move mc4d to
wxWindows. We've had discussions from time to time about a Java port,
but that effort seems to have stalled. In any case, I feel that there
is merit to having a native version of the code. I've been sitting on
several modifications to the source code that we wanted to include in
a 2.2 release but haven't been able to do a release because, for
reasons I have not yet determined, I am unable to compile a working
version of the X11 version of the code. (Last time I tried to debug
it was 13 months ago during my previous India trip, but I attempt a
new compile with every new gcc, glibc, or XFree86 release.)

Do people think it would be useful to have a native cross-platform
version of the MagicCube4d application? This would enable us to bring
some of the UNIX-only functionality (such as n^4, n > 3 and macros) to
the Windows version and would eliminate much of the code duplication.
I may never have time to do this, but if I thought others might be
interested in a newer version, it would certainly increase the
likelihood of my doing it.

As I reread this message, I barely recognize my own writing style. I
guess maybe I am still a bit jet-lagged after all! In any case, I'd
be interested in any thoughts on this....

--Jay
--- End forwarded message ---





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