unsolved
Member
Corners will help prune the *search* a lot. You spend most of the time
in any standard IDA* search right at the outer limits of your pruning table.
Your search tree includes many move sequences that disturb the corners.
Let's say you are eight moves into a search, with a target depth of 15,
and the table says you are eight moves away from a corner solution. You
know then that you can prune your search immediately and backtrack.
No need to consider any further subnodes.
Originally I thought you meant to scan a database of corners-only to aid in the search for solutions where corners were unsolved in the original cube. I think I understand what you really meant now. So, what you do is, generate face moves only from the cube from a solved position, store the corner orientations along with how far they are from the solved position, and these are like "roadmaps" to your distance from being solved. Is that correct?
I would think at some point, you would duplicate a configuration, even though you are a different distance from the solution.
Or did someone already map every corner config possible to a "turns-from-solved" number?