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Posted by Alen123 11 hours ago

Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states(everycube.alen.is)
198 points | 65 comments
arealaccount 4 minutes 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

dcanelhas 9 minutes ago||
This 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.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.

noduerme 4 hours ago||
I 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 4 hours ago||
Casino games are rarely zero house edge. Is there a way you signaled this feature to problem solvers? Did the game prove to be successful?
crucio 1 hour ago|||
any time there is skill in an online casino game where money is involved, there is cheating too
DonHopkins 13 minutes ago||
Just change the parity by swapping two stickers on a corner piece, and no amount of skill can solve it.
huflungdung 1 hour ago||
[dead]
jcims 9 hours ago||
My 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 8 hours ago|
Auto rotate and auto scrolling would be neat.

Edit: also 2D https://www.github.com/AdamWhiteHat/RubiksCubeControlWpf

zetanor 7 hours ago||
Sweet, 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.
kdavis 2 hours ago||
Donald, is that you?
HPsquared 3 hours ago|||
That's more money than there is in the universe, I think you're onto a winner here!
hahahaa 3 hours ago|||
You only need to sell one at $50, then market cap does the rest and you are boundlessly rich.
sail0rm00n 3 hours ago|||
If we can capture even 1% of the market…
thih9 3 hours ago||
In case someone is curious, NFTs were tradeable tokens popular for a short while in the early 2020s.

> Initially pitched in 2017 as a new class of investment asset, NFT trading increased from US$82 million in 2020 to US$17 billion in 2021. Its market was occasionally compared to an economic bubble or a Ponzi scheme. In 2022, the NFT market collapsed; a May 2022 estimate was that the number of sales was down over 90% compared to 2021. By September 2023 one report claimed that over 95% of NFT collections had zero monetary value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token

/s

avadodin 57 minutes ago||
The reason NFTs "failed" is that the "assets" were jpegs with infinitesimal intrinsic value(pre–ai slop) and even less market appeal.

We have people wasting money on jpegs and people wanting to own things outside of game inventory screens even today. Something akin to NFTs could still become a part of the economy.

theginger 57 minutes ago||
Anyone 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 38 minutes ago|
It 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.
snowwrestler 7 hours ago||
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.

somenameforme 5 hours ago|
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?

notpushkin 3 hours ago||
The 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!

Waterluvian 9 hours ago||
Ah nice, it has some of my favourites!
r4ndomname 9 hours ago|
I am very curious about your other favorites it does but have.
Waterluvian 9 hours ago||
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.

bambax 4 hours ago|||
When 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.

tgv 5 hours ago|||
This here is the difference between theory and practice. Our minds are to feeble to understand reality.
PaulHoule 9 hours ago||
Reminds 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.

olek1983 2 hours ago|
There 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 1 hour ago|
Here is another way of looking at the same question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252106

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