From: Don Woods Subject: excerpts from Singmaster To: CUBE-LOVERS at MIT-MC [In reply to message from Plummer sent 1 JAN 1981 1315-EST.] ** SPOILER WARNING!! SPOILER WARNING!! ** This message gives the shortest solutions known to Singmaster (as of the fifth edition of his booklet) for three pretty and moderately complex patterns, recently referred to as "baseball" (or "worm"), "snake", and "cube-in-a-cube". People wishing to investigate these patterns (as described in earlier messages) may not wish to read further. Notes: Singmaster uses the half-twist measure. His notation also includes special representation for the slice (center-twist) and antislice (such as L+R as opposed to L'+R) operations, which he counts as two twists; I have expanded this to strict "befuddler" (BFUDLR) notation in this message. BASEBALL or WORM RUFFD'RL'FB'D'F'R'FFRUUFRRF'R'U'F'UUFR SNAKE BRL'D'RRDR'LB'RR + UBBU'DBBRLUUR'L'BBD' It's not too hard to get to the snake, if you don't mind wasting few twists. Start with DLLRRD' and you're most of the way there. This assumes you know simple macros for swapping two pairs of edge cubies and for flipping two edge cubies. CUBE IN A CUBE BL'DDLDF'DDFD'B' + F'RUUR'U'BUUB'UF Again, the cube-in-a-cube is not hard to generate using two instances of the commutator macro -- R'FRF' UF'U'F U'RUR' -- plus a few simple extra twists. This is left as an exercise to the reader. -- Don.