Cube Solver (need advice on the last layer)

[Stefan]

Dang, I wish I had you review that document before I sent it off.

I'm so proud right now
The 40 million evaluations mentioned in the next paragraph, is that for htm, qtm or both?

The first is, my pruning table index is not a hash of the whole cube position, but a hash of only portions of the cube position.

Damn, I never thought of using a hash at all. In the programs I wrote so far, I always just used the state values (edge orientation number, corner permutation number, what I used for the transition tables as well) as index directly. And yeah, I think I know what you mean with black magic. For example using the position of five edges and two corners for pruning, should I use ones making up a compact 2x2x3 block, or is it better to select separated pieces? I think I did some tests for this a while back but never got around to writing a solver then...

I'll be writing all of this up, including how I selected the pruning tables and all the tricks I used.

Looking forward to that.