From cube-lovers-errors@oolong.camellia.org Thu Jun 5 01:28:40 1997 Return-Path: cube-lovers-errors@oolong.camellia.org Received: from oolong.camellia.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by oolong.camellia.org (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id BAA05396; Thu, 5 Jun 1997 01:28:40 -0400 Precedence: bulk Errors-To: cube-lovers-errors@oolong.camellia.org Message-Id: <199706050527.BAA20605@life.ai.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 01:25:33 -0400 From: michael reid To: Hoey@aic.nrl.navy.mil, cube-lovers@ai.mit.edu, kociemba@hrz1.hrz.th-darmstadt.de Subject: Re: Detailed explanation of two phase algorithm dan writes > One final thing, which I'm not sure ever got asked, much less > answered, is that Mike Reid did an exhaustive search of the subgroup > (7 Jan 1995). Did this verify that the optimal > face-turn process for each element of the subgroup is a word on those > generators? Or are there shortcuts that use forbidden quarter-turns? i guess i didn't ask this explicitly, but i certainly thought about it. there's no reason to preclude the existence of such shortcuts. i posted the antipodes for this subgroup, so anyone who wants to search for shortcuts can do so. in fact, herbert gives a shortcut for the first position. herbert replies ) There definitely are shortcuts with quarter turns. I just tried the ) first of the antipodes of phase2 Mike Reid gave (7 Jan 1995) with 18 ) moves. They usually are hard to solve with the algorithm, but because of ) the asymmetrie of stage2, conjugation with moves, that turn the whole ) cube lead to a much easier to solve state. Within less than a minute a ) had the generator B R2 U2 L2 R2 B2 F' . U' R2 U F' D2 R2 B' D F' D' ) (17). ) It would be interesting, if it is possible to reduce all of the ) antipodes of phase2 to 17 moves, which would reduce algorithms upper ) bound for the maneuver length. yes, it would be interesting, but it would not improve the upper bound. recall that i already gave the upper bound of 29 face turns. to do this, one must verify that the antipodes in stage 2 can be avoided by choosing the last turn in stage 1 properly. specifically, if sequence R' reduces the position to the intermediate subgroup , then so does sequence R . the last face turn in stage 1 is always a quarter turn of either F, L, B or R. so we can always change the direction of this quarter turn, if necessary. my program verified that by making the proper choice, we can avoid the positions at distance 18f. however, the same approach can probably improve the upper bound in the quarter turn metric (currently 42q). here the antipodes in stage 2 are at distance 30q. in fact, the diameter of the whole cube group is probably less than that (24q ???), so most of the positions at large distance have shortcuts. there are a lot of these positions to test, and finding shortcuts isn't always easy. this is all discussed in my message "new upper bounds" of jan 7 1995. mike