Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

AAlen123 about 4 hours ago 20 commentsRead Article on everycube.alen.is

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82% Positive

Analyzed from 571 words in the discussion.

Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

purplemoonx•16 minutes 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?

I blame guitars.

All these kids got bad ass at playing Wonderwall, PHP was just slightly less cool than playing Wonderwall. So for 2-4 years they were sidetracked.

Playing Wonderwall at parties.

But if they had went straight from solving Rubik's Cube in 1 min to O(1) time complexity in a REST endpoint like peak 2-way communications (WebSocket, GRPC) these fuckers would be optimizing LLM embeddings at this point.

Karpathy? No, I want Steve from the Chess club who could recite any J.R.R. Tolkien writing, who has a Runescape character worth $4 million. Fuck LeCunn. Where's Steve?!

STEVE! I'm sorry I laughed at your Pokemon collection. I'm sorry Steve! I'm fucking sorry! PLEASE COME BACK

eurleif•6 minutes ago

With 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.

jcims•about 2 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•about 1 hour ago

Auto rotate and auto scrolling would be neat.

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

snowwrestler•23 minutes 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.

zetanor•30 minutes 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.

nzealand•35 minutes ago

It 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•26 minutes ago

Solved theoretically? I figure you could at least intuit that reversing all the moves in the scramble in reverse order would solve it.

Waterluvian•about 2 hours ago

Ah nice, it has some of my favourites!

r4ndomname•about 2 hours ago

I am very curious about your other favorites it does but have.

Waterluvian•about 2 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.

richstokes•30 minutes ago

First thought; this could be turned into a really cool password generator

netvarun•about 2 hours ago

Wow, 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 ), 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•about 1 hour ago

just shipped a fix, the app now listens for hash/URL changes and updates the view without needing a reload. thanks for catching this!

PaulHoule•about 2 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.

cr125rider•about 3 hours ago

I love this. Excellent weird internet thing.

donkeylazy456•about 2 hours ago

literally doom scrolling

Alen123•about 1 hour ago

haha healthiest possible doom scroll though

cuoder•about 1 hour ago

Non-AI posts be like

khazhoux•about 1 hour ago

At 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•about 1 hour ago

It's actually about 4x10^19 (exponent 19, not 9).