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I've run an analysis of all of the positions in the Triple Cross puzzle. I count the number of positions with the horizontal slider centered and the left slider in the down position. There are four sequences that change the tiles and return to this position: LUCD, ULDC, RUCD and URDC. All puzzle positions can be solved within 24 moves. There are only 7 positions (out of 2.9 trillion total) that take 24 moves to solve.

The program took 2 hours 44 minutes to run on a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor (using one core) and uses about 1.4GB of RAM while running.

Here's a list of how many positions are at each number of moves away from a solution. I've included an example of one position at each level.

total positions = 2940537600

 0          1 ..---..12.....34ba
 1          4 .1.--..32b.-...4a.
 2         12 13b.-...2a.-...4.-
 3         36 3.ab.1..2..-...4--
 4        104 3..b.2..4.a.1-..--
 5        303 3.b..a4.....21-.--
 6        884 3....b.2....a41---
 7       2579 ....3a2....b.41---
 8       7521 ...42a......b31---
 9      21937 4..2...3.b..a.1---
10      63923 ..a.3b4......21---
11     186196 .....a43.b...21---
12     542124 ..4.b......3a21---
13    1577700 ......4.3a.b.21---
14    4585298 b.......4a..321---
15   13282991 .ab.......4.321---
16   38149858 ...b.a...4..321---
17  107133350 .....a....b4321---
18  283555419 ........a.b4321---
19  644626804 .......a..b4321---
20 1014637237 .........ab4321---
21  719688345 .........ba4321---
22  111515380 .a....b...4.321---
23     959587 ..4...ab..32..1---
24          7 ...b4.--.3..1a-.2.

Update:

Here are the seven positions that are 24 moves from solved:

-b2..4-...1...-a.3
-..42.-...1a..-b3.
-.2.....-3.ba..-14
b-2....-a.1..-..43
.-24.13.-....b-a..
..3..a---.4..b..21
...b4.--.3..1a-.2.

I've released a new version of Twisted Polyhedra. Nothing much has changed. There was some code I put in the previous version to work around bugs in click detection in Tcl3d. This code introduced more problems than it fixed, so I took it out. This version is built with a new version of Tcl3d (0.3.2).

This version fixes a bug introduced in version 1.1 and adds the 2x2x2, 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 cubes. Hopefully I'll have the 6x6x6 and larger cubes available soon.

I just released a new version of this puzzle that should be a lot faster than the previous version. I'm taking better advantage of OpenGL (and it's associated hardware acceleration) when doing whole puzzle rotations.

This is version 1.4 of Twisted Polyhedra, a program for simulating puzzles on your computer.

The puzzles included are the NxNxN cubes, two dodecahedra, an octahedron, a cuboctahedron, and an icosahedron.

The program was built using Tcl3d by Paul Obermeier.

Downloads:

twisted-1.4.exe (a windows executable)

twisted-1.4.zip (the source code)

I'm working on a new program for simulating various types of puzzles. I'm developing it with Tcl3d, so it should run on all of the operating systems that it supports. This program will probably be similar to Puzzler in that I plan on implementing different types of puzzles.

I hope to have a beta version available to download soon.

This (it will move here in a few days) was a pretty fun puzzle. The first 11 puzzles were really simple and only took me a few seconds each. The last puzzle took a few minutes. I could have written a program to solve it like I have on previous puzzles, but I thought I'd figure it out the old fashioned way. I got about 30% of the way through the puzzle using basic logic. Then, I took a screen capture and started making some guesses. If I had to backtrack, I had my screen print to work with.

Here's the answer:

I haven't been posting much on my blog lately. I'm losing interest in the Google puzzles, and the quality of these puzzle isn't very consistent.

I've been trying to read up on 3d graphics and quaternions so I can do some puzzle programming for my PDA/phone. I'm probably going to to stick with PalmOS API's, although I'm considering J2ME.

Here's a program to solve the latest Google puzzle (archive will be here).

You can use the applet below to view the solution. I've also included an optimal solution from a more difficult starting position.