Magic Cube 4D For Linux

Magic Cube 4D project is a four-dimensional Rubik's Cube.

MagicCube4D is a fully functional four-dimensional analog of Rubik's cube. The image above shows the puzzle in its solved state. Click on it for a simple resizable applet version that you can interact with to get a feeling for how it works. Download the full-featured application below and try to solve it. Please read the FAQ for a more complete description of the puzzle. If the Java applet or application fail to start you may need to install a Java virtual machine. Click here for a current one.

Don Hatch and Melinda Green have developed it on and off over several years. Jay Berkenbilt has recently joined us to help with Linux support and source control. Don and Jay were the first to have solved the puzzle making extensive use of the move macro facility in the UNIX version. Roice Nelson became the first person to solve the puzzle without using macros. For his solution, he extended Philip Marshall's 3D "Ultimate Solution to Rubik's Cube".

You can learn Roice's solution if you don't feel like trying to solve it yourself first. Using his techniques, Roice and others have continued to find ever shorter solutions so that the record currently recovered by Roice required only 334 twists! You can find documentation of these and other milestones on the MagicCube4D Hall Of Fame page. If you solve it with or without reading the solution, send us your log file and we'll list you in the MagicCube4D hall of fame too!

The mathematically inclined may be interested to know that the number of possible states for the 4D cube is exactly

(24!x32!)/2 x 16!/2 x 2^23 x (3!)^31 x 3 x(4!/2)^15 x 4

which can also be expressed as

32! 24! 16! 2^22 6^32 12^15