Sunday 8 February 2015

Mindcuber - Quick Update



A little while back I wrote about my new Lego toy – a Mindcuber designed by David Gilday… for this non-twisty-guy, definitely the least painful way to solve a 3*3*3 Rubik’s Cube. 

David recently released a string of updates to the software (along with a version for the Educational kit) which have significantly improved the scanning speed, improved the solving algorithms and added the ability to solve directly to a number of patterns...

 … so now you can instruct this little contraption to give you:

  • a cube with a snake around all six sides, 
  • a chequerboard pattern, 
  • six spots, 
  • a cube-in-cube (my favourite) and 
  • a Super-Flip pattern (every single edge piece is flipped 180 degrees – the stuff of nightmares for padawans like me!). 


 
If you’ve already got one made up, make sure you grab a copy of the new software, and if you’re considering building yourself one – it’s EVEN BETTER now!

3 comments:

  1. Cool. I've not seen the snake pattern before. I see that the White-Yellow side has a vertical path. One can deduce that the Yellow-White side has a horizontal path, and the other four sides each have a 90-degree turn in the path. But now I am curious: is there a second snake-like pattern which has a 90-degree turn on each of the six faces; or is there a parity restriction that prevents that? I'll have to investigate...

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  2. I have solved a snake pattern with all faces having a 90-degree turn along the path. Thanks for the diversion.

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    1. Great stuff Tyler! I am impressed ... care to hack some Mindstorms code to reproduce it? :-)

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