Gws
Member
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2018
- Messages
- 10
You may have heard of hypercubing, which refers to areas surrounding analogs of Rubik's cubes in things like 4 or more dimensions, and other geometries such as hyperbolic space. The most common of these puzzles is this, the virtual 3x3x3x3:
Hypercubing often seems extremely complicated and overwhelming to those who aren't involved in it and have experience, but this is mostly due to lack of information and help on explaining things. (although getting used to these puzzles still definitely takes time)
This post aims to give access to helpful resources, break down the different main parts of the community, give some history of these parts of the community, and overall help get people going who are interested in hypercubing.
TLDR: If you are interested in hypercubing there is a lot of information on the new (and still in development) hypercubing website here: https://hypercubing.xyz/
Speedsolving
Speedsolving is likely the part of hypercubing that many of you might be interested in. Speedsolving hypecubes for years was never really practical with the programs that were available to simulate them. However, a couple people still endured the difficulty of the mouse controls and did some timed solves, notably tetrian22 who got a 10:11.87 solve of the 3x3x3x3. In addition to this, Melinda's 2x2x2x2 (which I will discuss later) was speedsolved heavily, a worlds best progression can be found here.
However, hyperspeedsolving boomed in the fall of 2022 following the creation of hyperspeedcube which includes many features including customizable keyboard controls, piece filters, etc. This led to first a big race for the virtual 3x3x3x3 cube world record bringing it down from over 10 minutes to now under 2 minutes. In addition to the 3x3x3x3, people began speedsolving bigger and bigger puzzles as well as multiple other puzzles, and now, we have a leaderboard with 16 different events that have all gotten drastically faster in the recent months. The current world records are all listed on the leaderboard page here.
Physical puzzles
This will be a very brief overview of this history, a more in depth history is given in this video. Melinda Green invented a physical representation of a 2x2x2x2 hypercube information on this puzzle can be found here. Following this, for years people thought this was a novelty puzzle and no other physical puzzles (that aren't what the hypercubing community refers to as "sticker soup") would be made. However, throughout 2022, 4 more physical puzzles were designed and built leading to us now having a physical 3x3x3x3! Unfortunately the physical 3x3x3x3 is not very useable. However it is incredible that these puzzles were built and many other designs for physical puzzles have been made! There is also now a program to simulate the physical 3x3x3x3 leading to the speedsolving leaderboard category of "virtual physical 3x3x3x3"
Puzzles!
Although only a couple hypercubing puzzles have been widely solved, there are soo many available and very interesting puzzles you can solve as well as hypercubing programs such as magic puzzle ultimate that lets you define your own puzzles. A large part of the hypercubing community is interested in trying and solving these new puzzles as well as imagining new ones. In addition to magic puzzle ultimate, hyperspeedcube 2 is being developed that will be able to simulate puzzles that were never before possible along with including many accessibility features such as piece filters, keyboard controls, and more allowing these puzzles to actually be manageable to use and solve.
In addition to solving all of these puzzles, multiple people have worked on fmc and computer assisted fmc for these puzzles and have achieved some very impressive world records.
I hope this helps you get to know more about the hypercubing community! If you are interested in learning more or trying to get involved there is lots of information on https://hypercubing.xyz/.
Hypercubing often seems extremely complicated and overwhelming to those who aren't involved in it and have experience, but this is mostly due to lack of information and help on explaining things. (although getting used to these puzzles still definitely takes time)
This post aims to give access to helpful resources, break down the different main parts of the community, give some history of these parts of the community, and overall help get people going who are interested in hypercubing.
TLDR: If you are interested in hypercubing there is a lot of information on the new (and still in development) hypercubing website here: https://hypercubing.xyz/
Speedsolving
Speedsolving is likely the part of hypercubing that many of you might be interested in. Speedsolving hypecubes for years was never really practical with the programs that were available to simulate them. However, a couple people still endured the difficulty of the mouse controls and did some timed solves, notably tetrian22 who got a 10:11.87 solve of the 3x3x3x3. In addition to this, Melinda's 2x2x2x2 (which I will discuss later) was speedsolved heavily, a worlds best progression can be found here.
However, hyperspeedsolving boomed in the fall of 2022 following the creation of hyperspeedcube which includes many features including customizable keyboard controls, piece filters, etc. This led to first a big race for the virtual 3x3x3x3 cube world record bringing it down from over 10 minutes to now under 2 minutes. In addition to the 3x3x3x3, people began speedsolving bigger and bigger puzzles as well as multiple other puzzles, and now, we have a leaderboard with 16 different events that have all gotten drastically faster in the recent months. The current world records are all listed on the leaderboard page here.
Physical puzzles
This will be a very brief overview of this history, a more in depth history is given in this video. Melinda Green invented a physical representation of a 2x2x2x2 hypercube information on this puzzle can be found here. Following this, for years people thought this was a novelty puzzle and no other physical puzzles (that aren't what the hypercubing community refers to as "sticker soup") would be made. However, throughout 2022, 4 more physical puzzles were designed and built leading to us now having a physical 3x3x3x3! Unfortunately the physical 3x3x3x3 is not very useable. However it is incredible that these puzzles were built and many other designs for physical puzzles have been made! There is also now a program to simulate the physical 3x3x3x3 leading to the speedsolving leaderboard category of "virtual physical 3x3x3x3"
Puzzles!
Although only a couple hypercubing puzzles have been widely solved, there are soo many available and very interesting puzzles you can solve as well as hypercubing programs such as magic puzzle ultimate that lets you define your own puzzles. A large part of the hypercubing community is interested in trying and solving these new puzzles as well as imagining new ones. In addition to magic puzzle ultimate, hyperspeedcube 2 is being developed that will be able to simulate puzzles that were never before possible along with including many accessibility features such as piece filters, keyboard controls, and more allowing these puzzles to actually be manageable to use and solve.
In addition to solving all of these puzzles, multiple people have worked on fmc and computer assisted fmc for these puzzles and have achieved some very impressive world records.
I hope this helps you get to know more about the hypercubing community! If you are interested in learning more or trying to get involved there is lots of information on https://hypercubing.xyz/.
