Tuesday, June 6, 2017

2x3x4 Camouflage Cuboid

I bought the puzzle in 2014. Was mystified for a whole year. Finally solved it in August 2015. Played with it a short while then as far as I know I did not solve it again until yesterday. I just haven't been drawn to it since then. How did it attract me now? I put all my puzzles into Amazon boxes. Instead of all different sized boxes I decided to try more uniform sized boxes. The 2x3x4 Camouflage was not solved so it didn't sit flat in the box. I wanted to be able to store it in cuboid shape.

I tried and made some progress but finally decided to consult my notes. They are all in this blog. The notes jogged my memory and I solved it. I am not real comfortable with it at this point though. I think I solved it enough a couple years ago to get it down. I want to solve it enough to get good at it again.

So far I am totally not getting it!

I just reread something from a past post and I think I see what I am doing wrong. I think I get it now. It says, "Twisting Corner Blocks. Using 2x2x2 moves do things like ( R U Ri Ui ) x 2 or ( R Ui Ri U ) x 2 or the left-handed versions, to orient corner blocks. Only one corner on the bottom layer gets twisted, so the bottom is the working layer where pieces are paired up. Three pieces in the top layer get twisted, but since they are corner blocks, already reduced corners do not get unreduced."

June 7, 2017
With the info in the paragraph above and the center-solver in a past post I think I have it. Now if only I can keep at it long enough to really get it down.

June 8, 2017
Put a real good scramble on it last night then worked at solving it off and on (if you know what I mean) until I reached this point. Thought I'd take a picture and show Roark and Roriana before I finished the solve. (somewhere along the line I deleted pics from Flickr so the link was broken so I removed the link on 5/12/20)

June 9, 2017
It has been going well except for one thing. Sometimes the center pieces do not have to cycle from Bottom Back to Bottom Front to Top Back or Bottom Front to Bottom Back to Top Back, and I see no simple way around it. I thought I did have a way. Do Top to Top to Bottom, but I messed up and ended up scrambling edges including one of the yellow ones. I'm not sure I messed up. Maybe it just doesn't work. But why not? I think I messed up. Well, let's do some re-solving and see....

When I re-solved it the centers were solvable with one of the two algorithms I have in my arsenal. I fiddled around trying to figure out another one but didn't, so put a good scramble on it and then started solving it again.

June 10, 2017
Turns out that from the solved state if you do the Corners First 2 pair algorithm it makes steps! Cool!

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