How did I get here?

So I will admit that I occasionally procrastinate when I get bored of doing a task and one of my favorite things to do is watch youtube videos. Thats when I recently stumbled upon a few videos of Rubik’s cubes. I have had a Rubik’s cube as a child and it was a really fun toy but I eventually solved the 3x3x3 cube and then proceeded to destroy it. I was definitely a very destructive child. Now a series of videos have appeared showing other extremely large cubes and polyhedrons which sparked some interest in understanding how to make an algorithm to solve these puzzles.

Here is a video of a 13x13x13 Rubik’s cube being solved.

What’s next?

Well, it would be awesome if I could buy several large Rubik’s cubes and try out different methods but that would be too expensive and time consuming. There also comes a point where it becomes too difficult to make a higher order cube due to physical and manufacturing limitations; I would say that a 22x22x22 cube is the largest I have seen but it was barely holding itself together on each turn. So lets just make a Rubik’s cube simulator!

The Specs

Okay, so we are going to make a Rubik’s cube simulator… so where do we begin? Lets just list out all of the requirements for the simulator.

1.  It will replicate a real Rubik’s cube of any dimension up to 200x200x200
2. The simulator will scramble the cube
3. The simulator will run multiple algorithms and provide a timer
4. The cube can be seen from a 3d perspective

After searching on github, I had found many Rubik’s cube simulators written in different programming languages. Since my main focus of this project is to test out a few algorithms, I will take an existing github project and expand it to support my requirements. I ended up finding a project that was built in unity with C# and the 3d look of the cube was very appealing. This is the link to the project : RSolver. This will save me a lot of time looking for materials and assets.

Post is still in progress… check in later for updates =)