Twist

ZOMGWTFRTFM

Cube x 5

One of the things I bought myself with my birthday Amazon gift card was a Rubik’s Professor Cube.
I bought a Rubik’s Cube soon after reading Douglas Hofstadter’s March 1981 article in Scientific American. I’ve never been all that fast at unscrambling the cube, both because my fingers don’t move that fast and because I haven’t [...]

Great moments in Visa customer service. Also God.

See last, parenthetical remark.
Also, I think counting arguments set a lower bound on God’s Algorithm for M12, in the worst case, of 22 moves. So there’s a bit of room for improvement on the limits…

Yay me

I finally found a solution to the M12 Puzzle from sciam.com. A hideously inefficient solution, but it works.
Spoilery remarks below.
Kriz and Siegel point out that the technique usually used with Rubik’s cube — finding sequences of moves that alter only a few cubies while leaving the rest alone, then using those sequences to put cubies [...]

Pirates!

Here’s a puzzle I just came across; I think I’ve seen it before but I don’t remember the answer:
You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his [...]