Permuting the cube at EnthusiastiCon
← Back to homeI like fidgeting - especially with Rubik’s cubes. With EnthusiastiCon I had the chance and privilege to share my fondness of this topic in form of a short ~10 minute talk.
Below the stickers of the Rubik’s cube lies a beautiful structure arising from just a handful of rules. Let us explore permutations by example of this twisty puzzle and see how they can turn into the building blocks of the structure behind it. We can use an exciting dualism between function and data to explore the problem space and sketch a route towards finding your own solution for this and similar puzzles.
Along with the talk material I wrote some software to animate and solve Rubik’s Cubes. The code consists of two parts:
- A portion of TypeScript code loads images, applies some dithering to reduce the color palette and produces a description of cube rotations as JSON. Tests for it are written with Jest.
- Blender files for the animations use a python script to read a desired animation from a JSON file and setup the scene for rendering.
The slides as well as code and assets are available here: github.com/runjak/2020-06-06.enthusiasticon.