A Rotating Puzzle

Initializing live version
Download to Desktop

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System

Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.

Permutation puzzles are games that test your ingenuity. In them, some pattern is rearranged according to some fixed rules not involving chance, giving rise to a new pattern that subsequently needs to be directed at a prescribed goal. The paragon of this type of game is Rubik's Cube. This Demonstration presents a permutation puzzle played on a 3×3 board with labeled squares. Click a red button to rotate the four squares around it by a quarter turn. Choose the difficulty of the game, which is a rough measure of how many buttons have to be clicked to reach the position with difficulty 0, having all squares in order. To undo a move, click the last button used three more times.

Contributed by: Jaime Rangel-Mondragon (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


Snapshots


Details

References

[1] D. Joyner, Adventures in Group Theory: Rubik's Cube, Merlin's Machine and Other Mathematical Toys, 2nd ed., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

[2] J. Slocum, D. Singmaster, W. Huang, D. Gebhardt, and G. Hellings, The Cube: The Ultimate Guide to the World's Bestselling Puzzle: Secrets, Stories, Solutions, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009.



Feedback (field required)
Email (field required) Name
Occupation Organization
Note: Your message & contact information may be shared with the author of any specific Demonstration for which you give feedback.
Send