cubes

colored cubes have always fascinated me.

who hasn't seen the all-famous rubik's cube? the 6-faced 6-colored 3X3X3 wonder that had me marvelling at the beauty of its symmetry and geometry for hours together at a stretch. the puzzle which gave me immense satisfaction when i figured out, all by myself, how to solve one face. but then, however much i strained my puny little brain, i couldn't figure out a strategy to solve it in its entirety, and had to resort to cheating by looking the solution up. solving it is still my favorite pastime, and i try to get faster and faster at it. right now though, i'm no where close to the gifted 'speed-cubers', who can solve a scrambled cube in under 20 friggin' seconds.



anyway, then came the rubik's revenge:




and the professor's cube:



i haven't dared to lay my hands on either one . . . . . yet!! why, you ask? have you ever laid your hands on a rubik's cube? if you did, you'd know why.


moving on, do you think people would stop there? oooooooooh no siree. because people are crazy. so they went on to create an extended version of rubik's cube in 4 dimensions!! it looks like this when projected onto a screen:



if you think that's mad, how about this? a bunch of freaks took that concept one huuuuuuuuuuge step further and extended it into 5 - that's right - five bloody dimensions!! when you project that onto a mere 2 dimensional screen, you're bound to get dizzy:



and the last time i checked, there were three actual people who solved the 5d version. they're members of the 'hall of insanity' - yep they're not famous, they sure are insane. after knowing the existence of such freaks, now i have all the guts needed to attack the rubik's revenge followed by the professor's cube. if i'm still alive after solving these, i'll try to look at these 4 and 5 dimensional ones.

oh, and there are plenty of other such puzzle games for those who're interested:

here's presenting the square1:



and the pyraminx:



and the megaminx:



makes me wonder what else exists in the world of mathematics? i'm gonna solve these (atleast make an attempt to solve these) someday.

for now, i ran into another interesting puzzle game. here it is. unlike the scary ones presented above, this game's actually (relatively) easily solvable. go ahead rack your brains :)

p.s. - all images have been taken from wikipedia, except the 4d one which has been taken from whatever showed up on google images, and the 5d one which has been taken from a link on a recent post on /.

-w