I learned about the game of Quoridor when my sister begged me to play the game with her husband. “Somebody’s got to beat him at it!” she...| Solutions Looking For Problems
I am a programmer with an almost unhealthy obsession with math. Occasionally, my job provides some intriguing challenges where I can apply that math interest. Sadly, I can't share any of those.In my spare time, I find myself working on problems that nobody asked me to solve, but which provide me with entertaining challenges. I call them a "solution looking for a problem". I do get to share these, and this is what you'll find here.| Solutions Looking Fo
This little project came from two things:1. The fact that you can start with a solved cube and repeatedly apply a pattern of moves until the cube is returned to its solved state.2. The fact that I kept messing up my son’s higher order cubes because I lost my place in the pattern and irritating him when I asked him to solve them.So, I made a spreadsheet to model several different types of cubes. This lets me try out patterns and see what they would do without messing up a real cube.First, A ...| Solutions Looking Fo
The ChallengeI was playing with my son’s Rubik’s Cubes and tried to scramble a cube randomly so that no two squares with the same color were side by side. Here’s one way to do it: But I wanted a scramble that looked like a random scramble. No matter how many different moves I made, I couldn’t do it. Every time I separated two squares with the same color, two other squares of the same color would touch somewhere else.Looking for an easy answer, I went to puzzling.stackexchange.com and ...| Solutions Looking Fo