Question about Cube Explorer output

[blah]

What does "//order n" mean in the results for incomplete cubes?

 

[Lucas Garron]

What does "//order n" mean in the results for incomplete cubes?

I don't see it in 4.64.
Is it not the order of the alg?

 

[blah]

I'm using 4.64 too. Funny thing is, I've never seen it in previous versions But that's probably because I didn't use CE much back then.

Anyway, I just (randomly) ran a search for this (in ACube notation):
? ? ? ? !! ? +? -? ? !!

And I got this:
Using D-Face accelerator table.
computation started...

Searching depth 7

Searching depth 8

Searching depth 9

R2 F2 R' B2 R F2 R' B2 R' (9f*) //order 3
R2 D' R U2 R' D R U2 R (9f*) //order 3
R2 D' L F2 L' D R U2 R (9f*) //order 3
L2 F2 L B2 L' F2 L B2 L (9f*) //order 3
L2 D R' F2 R D' L' U2 L' (9f*) //order 3
L2 D L' U2 L D' L' U2 L' (9f*) //order 3
... ...

Pardon the noob question, but what do you mean by "the order of the alg"?

 

[Johannes91]

Pardon the noob question, but what do you mean by "the order of the alg"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_(group_theory)

the order, sometimes period, of an element a of a group is the smallest positive integer m such that a^m = e (where e denotes the identity element of the group, and a^m denotes the product of m copies of a).

So the order of R U R' U R U2 R' is 6, the order of U is 4, etc..

 

[blah]

Pardon the noob question, but what do you mean by "the order of the alg"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_(group_theory)

the order, sometimes period, of an element a of a group is the smallest positive integer m such that a^m = e (where e denotes the identity element of the group, and a^m denotes the product of m copies of a).

So the order of R U R' U R U2 R' is 6, the order of U is 4, etc..

Ah! That's new Just to be sure that I've really got it, //order 2 = self-inverse, am I right?

Edit: So if no order's written there, does that mean m = infinity? Or is it just because m > 3? Because I don't think I've seen CE give me an //order 4 before.

 

[qqwref]

The order cannot be infinite if the group is of finite size (like the Rubik's Cube group, which has a finite number of positions). Can you give an example of an alg where it didn't give you the order?

 

[blah]

The order cannot be infinite if the group is of finite size (like the Rubik's Cube group, which has a finite number of positions). Can you give an example of an alg where it didn't give you the order?

Umm, every other time? The only orders CE ever displays are 2 and 3. I gave it this: ? ? ? ? !! ? ? ? ? !! and the first 3 results were:

U (1f)
U2 (1f) //order 2
U' (1f)

It didn't display //order 4 for U and U', so I guess it doesn't display orders 4 and above?

 

[qqwref]

Maybe. That's pretty weird... you'd think it would find the order for everything, if it was going to bother printing orders at all!