Comments on: Rubix Cube – LINQ Application

By: Luke Hoersten

Luke Hoersten — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 22:41:03 +0000

@Dan: Gustavo had some of the same hesitations as you. But the orientation, like Logan said, is really elegantly handled in an implicit way.

Speed is also something Gustavo asked about and he didn’t really understand the magnitude of LINQ. Just because it looks like DB table query syntax doesn’t mean that is how the data is represented. I don’t know if anyone knows how it’s implemented (being proprietary) but I’m sure MS wouldn’t release something like this if it was simply just a table.

The design should be scalable enough that even if LINQ doesn’t work so well, we can move to something more custom fit to our problem.

@Logan: Phil helped me get cygwin working on windows so mercurial should work now. Just simply installing cygwin should do it.

By: Logan

Logan — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 13:50:21 +0000

You can think of the different directions as slices of the cube. So a left or right side contains the 9 blocks on the left or right. The way you move a side counter-clockwise would be to orient the cube with the side face to the front of you, then either move the front blocks clockwise or counterclockwise, then move the orientation of the cube back to where it was.

As far as directions go, they are pretty much just what direction each color’s axis is in. I arbitrarily said that the cube’s white axis is the top and the green axis is the front, which is it’s “master” orientation. Therefore no matter what you do, a block’s side that is in the same direction as the white axis is considered “top”.

By: Daniel Tang

Daniel Tang — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 02:10:43 +0000

I haven’t really thought this through, but I wonder how efficient your representation would be. Also, directions seem to be relative (after you twist a cube, is “top” still reaaally “top”? How do you rotate a side face counter-clockwise?), which may be kind of confusing. But then again, I suck at Rubik’s cubes.