News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: Rubiks Cube Solver by schoen on Thursday July 09, 2026 @07:08PM (#48853603)
Does it effectively achieve God's Algorithm (minimum theoretically possible sequence of moves to solve each position)?
Re:Show HN: Rubiks Cube Solver by xmprt on Thursday July 09, 2026 @07:40PM (#48853928)
God's algorithm is not computationally feasible on consumer hardware so I'd assume not although there are many algorithms that can get pretty close (either matching or 1-2 moves off the optimal solution) which are much faster to solve. If you're curious, look up Cube Explorer which is an app that's built for this.
Re:Show HN: Rubiks Cube Solver by dtjc on Friday July 10, 2026 @11:31AM (#48861326)
God's algorithm has worked fine on consumer hardware for decades. Look up Korf. Even Cube Explorer has an optimal solver.
Re:Show HN: Rubiks Cube Solver by wozzp on Thursday July 09, 2026 @08:44PM (#48854396)
Not in practice. Computing the absolute minimum solution for every possible position is computationally infeasible for a web-based solver. This uses Kociemba’s two-phase algorithm instead, which produces very efficient solutions, usually close to optimal, without requiring enormous amounts of time and memory.
Re:Show HN: Rubiks Cube Solver by dtjc on Friday July 10, 2026 @11:41AM (#48861450)
Why infeasible? cube20.org says "a good desktop PC" can optimally solve 0.36 random positions per second. And that's from the year 2010. I don't see why a web-based solver 16 years later should be much slower.

And apparently vcube optimally solved six cubes per second eight years ago already: https://github.com/Voltara/vcube