back
123 comments
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.

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?
any time there is skill in an online casino game where money is involved, there is cheating too
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.
Donald, is that you?
Joke's on you, I'm going to do the same thing but only charge $5. Sucker!
That's more money than there is in the universe, I think you're onto a winner here!
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

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.
Auto rotate and auto scrolling would be neat.

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

I clicked the button on my Logitech M720 mouse to free spin, spun the wheel like I was on the Price is Right, and got to 791,001!
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.

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.

Ah nice, it has some of my favourites!
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.

This is pretty cool. Same concept (and I would assume implementation) as https://everyuuid.com/

Implementation details can be found here: https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/

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.

The color interpolation in 2D mode is bad. Instead of interpolating through RGB, you should use OKLCH

Demo: https://jsfiddle.net/t80eLfc2/2/

Interpolating in RGB just uses linear interpolation on each channel, so it ends up passing through grey in a lot of cases, and the colors look very desatured.

Interpolating in OKLCH preserves chroma and instead passes through different hues.

I used the "FX" option and I think there's a bug. The center tiles on each side always stay in the same position.
Reminds me of https://everyuuid.com/
Maybe show the minimum number of moves required to solve each state :)

And maybe sort them by "distance to solved".

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.
I love this. Excellent weird internet thing.
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]

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?

Wouldn't it be cool to click and then see the quickest solution and it rotates in front of you, or a sequence of moves to solve.
Ah great, so now I've got the choice to "Complete he Rubik's cube"... it'll just take 432520032 times as long as completing today's Instagram...
First thought; this could be turned into a really cool password generator
OK. So I put the slider into a random middle location. Then I zipped it back all the way left as fast as I could. Still not up to competitive speed cubing level! Shucks, golly, gee.
> 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

Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

iPhone; Safari; Lockdown mode.

Exponential growth is always mind boggling! Crazy to think there are that many states.
What's the correct way to sort a Rubik's Cube state?
this does permutations of pieces position and orientation

would be cool permutations of moves instead...the visuals would be especially interesting to have as a raw Rubik's simulator

well that's just like, your coordinate system, man
This is very satisfying to play with, top work!
Is your mercor.com site works really?
structure emerges from chaos at 23,738,673,083,197,685,761 & 34,677,398,788,068,093,945
But, why?
literally doom scrolling
Cool!
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?

I think you missed at least a few, can you re-check through them?
cool!
It would be really funny, and sociopathic, if every state change registered as a browser history entry so I had to click Back 50,000 times to get back to Hacker News.
nice, now sort the list in some interesting way