CubeTeacher

[dougbenham]

I don't know if this will help, but I have a link to an optimal EOline solver if that would help. Maybe you could try to contact the programmer for the source code? Oh, I got the program installed. It would be nice to see a menu of commands, not like buttons or anything, but like a text file that we could see on the main screen. It's kind of cumbersome to have to try to memorize all those commands.

Overall, though, this seems like a really good program.
Seeing how those F2L pairs and crosses come together will most certainly help a lot of people.

Yes I'm using the EOLine solver right now its pretty good. I just need to practice a bit and watch the EOLine solver do then try to learn from it.

Well, I suppose I could put a list of the key mappings on the screen for easy reference. However, the keys are meant to be natural. For example, when you do a U turn on the cube. You push the top layer with your right index finger. The right index finger corresponds to the letter J on the keyboard (at least my keyboard, maybe you have a different keyboard layout). Similarly, U' can be executed by pressing F (left index finger). When I first tried to manipulate the cube with this key configuration I thought it was insane and stupid. But after about 2 hours of trying, it finally made sense and I could cube just as fast as I can in real life.

[Lord Voldemort]

I tried it out, and wow, this is pretty cool.
Well, off to do some homework now.
I'll play around with it some more later, and see if I have more improvements.

[dougbenham]

Sick, I love it

P.S. - Please, add a timer!!! If not, I can use my stackmat

Ah yes. Excellent suggestion. I almost forgot about that =). I'll add a menu item called 'Start Timer', which will change to 'Stop Timer' when the timer is active. I'll add an option in the settings: It will be a checkbox labeled 'Stop timer when cube solved', which will be checked by default.

Any suggestions of what the hotkey for the timer should be?

[Lord Voldemort]

Spacebar would be good, if it's not already taken.
It's standard for all of the cube timers, so why not?

[dougbenham]

Spacebar would be good, if it's not already taken.

Nope haha. Sounds good. I'll add the new feature now.

[dougbenham]

Alright, update made. Added feature of timer. Version 0.9.1 Beta.
Updated main post with history and new screenshots. Let me know if its alright.

[EmersonHerrmann]

You could also try making bigger versions of this, although it might be hard

[dougbenham]

You could also try making bigger versions of this, although it might be hard

Bigger versions meaning 4x4, 5x5, etc? Yes that would definitely be more difficult and would probably require much more time to compute the solutions, however it has crossed my mind and I may get around to writing solvers for big cubes.

[badmephisto]

This is great. couple of things:

- when you go through the solution using arrows, could the moves be animated? Its hard to see what goes on when it snaps into places, especially with the rotations

- could there be a way to force the cross color?

- it doesnt look like its doing OLL/PLL, but it doesnt matter too much. I would really like to use this to find better ways of doing the F2L. It would be great if it spewed out F2L solutions, and you could go through all of them and see how they play out or something. but that seems like a lot of work (especially interface ***** work, the one noone ever wants to do)

anyways, nice!

[qqwref]

This is cool, a few ideas based on what you already have:
- Try to focus on keeping the computer to a human-like solving method. That is, use one or two algs per OLL/PLL/F2L case (and maybe allow the user to enter their own alg if they want), and try not to be *too* optimal. For instance the idea of solving the cross to try to preserve edge pairs is a good idea for FMC, but not so good for speedcubing since most people won't have time to do that in inspection until they get way more advanced. Similarly, if your computer is trying to find really nice solutions for the entire F2L at once, try not to do anything that a human wouldn't be able to think of in a solve (like solving three pairs at once with blockbuilding). Or you could try not to cancel between steps. I'm assuming here that someone who's just learning to use Fridrich won't be doing movecanceling or multislotting on the fly.
- I like the "greyed out" idea, but it might be better to use an only partial grey - what I mean is, instead of just making the pieces completely grey, maybe just make them much darker or greyer but still colored. It's definitely true that people should concentrate on the step they're doing, but it should still be possible to see the other colors to remind them that on a real cube they will be able to (or to allow them to do basic lookahead). I guess a sliding bar thing would be most appropriate here.
- For a full-cube solution, if this is reasonable, each step (cross, each F2L pair, OLL, PLL) should be on a new line - keeping the whole thing in one textbox looks kind of cluttered and is hard to read.
- I don't know how your program behaves at the end of the solve, but how about showing the solution and showing you what you did in each part? The program could offer suggestions on how to do the cross and F2Ls more efficiently, so that you could easily see if something needed work (and what to do instead).