Thursday, April 5, 2007

Rubik's cube news

Got an email from Gene Cooperman (CS Prof at Northeastern) a few days ago saying that he and some colleagues have shown that 26 moves (in the face-turn metric) suffice to solve Rubik's cube (the previous best upper bound is 27; lower bound is 20 - the superflip position). They used 7 terabytes of distributed disk space (I gotta get me one of those machines) and will be presenting their research at ISSAC-07.