Cracking the Cube Science News (08/11/07) Vol. 172, No. 6,
as it appeared in the August 20, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
Northeastern University computer scientist Daniel Kunkle has developed computer algorithms demonstrating that a Rubik's Cube in any configuration can be solved in 26 steps. He says the methods he worked out with advisor Gene Cooperman "can be applied to any combinatorial problem that you want to solve." Such problems could range from ascertaining how proteins will fold to scheduling air flights to playing checkers or chess. The results of Kunkle and Cooperman's work were detailed at the International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation in Ontario. Their method involved brute-force calculations by a supercomputer, and Kunkle and Cooperman devised techniques to store data in exactly the order the system would later need it, enabling the computer to read the data off the drive without performing a search. It is the researchers' ambition to reduce the maximum number of steps needed to solve a Rubik's Cube to 25, although many researchers believe that a Rubik's Cube can be solved in just 20 steps, but no one has proved that yet. Click Here to View Full Article
