Tuesday, 21 August 2007

Rubiks Cube Solution in 26 moves

It would be nice to have a powerful supercomputer to give me my Rubiks cube solution but I'll just have to settle for my little ol' brain. Computer scientists at Northeastern University in Boston though have managed to calculate a new solution to the cube in 26 moves or less. The previous record stood at only 1 more at 27 moves, but taking into account that there are 43 quintillion possible configurations it is a mean feat to knock 1 move off the record.

The cool thing is they're not done yet!

"Boffins Kunkle and Cooperman now hope to knock the maximum number of steps down to 25. They think they can use their brute-force search method on all of the configurations that require 26 steps to find a quicker way to solve them.

Even if they manage this feat, however, it will probably leave room for improvement. Most researchers believe that just 20 steps are enough to solve any Rubik's Cube, but no one has proved it yet."


See the full article here...


http://blog.sciencenews.org/mathtrek/2007/08/cracking_the_cube.html

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