Saturday 13 August 2011

A deeper understanding of the Rubik's cube

July 2nd, 2011 | by Sol |

From MITnews:

New research defines the ratio between the number of squares in a Rubik's cube-style puzzle game and the maximum number of moves required to solve it.

Erik Demaine, Associate Professor of computer science and engineering at MIT; his father, Martin Demaine, scientist visitors at the MIT computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory; Graduate Student Sarah Eisenstat; Anna Lubiw, who was Demaines PhD Thesis adviser at the University of Waterloo; and Tufts graduate student Andrew Winslow showed that the maximum number of moves required to solve a Rubik's cube with n squares per row is proportional to N ^ 2/log n. "the answer, and not N ^ 2, is a surprising thing," says Demaine.

Hat tip to John Cook.

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