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MIND-BENDING FOUR-DIMENSIONAL PUZZLES 171<br />

Figure A.l<br />

A 3 X 3 X 3 Rubik's cube dissected into three 3X3 layers.<br />

cubic in the center of the cube that has no color and plays no role in the puzzle.)<br />

Rubik's tesseract has four kinds of pieces that are also distinguished by the number<br />

of their colors.<br />

Those of you with computers may enjoy "MagicCube4D," a fully functional<br />

4-D analog of Rubik's cube developed by Daniel Green and Don Hatch. The current<br />

implementation is for Windows95 and Windows NT. The graphical model is<br />

an exact 4-D extension of the original, plastic 3-D puzzle, but with some useful<br />

features such as a "reset" button. Employing the same mathematical techniques<br />

that are used to project 3-D objects onto 2-D screens, MagicCube software "projects"<br />

the 4-D cube into three dimensions. The resulting 3-D objects can then be<br />

rendered with conventional graphics software onto the screen. It is very difficult<br />

to solve the 4-D Rubik's cube starting from a scrambled initial structure. If you<br />

ever do succeed, you will be one of a very elite group of people. You will almost<br />

certainly need to have previously mastered the original Rubik's cube before you<br />

can hope to solve this one. Luckily, all the skills learned for the original puzzle<br />

will help you with this one. Also, you don't need to ever solve the full puzzle to<br />

enjoy it. One fun game is to start with a slightly scrambled configuration, just a<br />

step or two away from the solved state, and work to back out those few random<br />

twists. If you get tired trying to solve the puzzle yourself, it is breathtaking to

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