Hi everyone!

Well, now I finally had time to try and solve my Square One. After
hours and hours of pondering it is now finally done. (For the first time ever -
I noticed the leaflet with instructions on how to get it to square one only
after I'd done a few rotations.) Now what needs to be done is to polish
the 'method' a bit (a lot), and find out if I was just lucky this time...

Altogether, it seems to be quite a nice puzzle, although at first I thought
that it was _very_ ugly and unpleasant. (But not half as ugly and unpleasant as
'Rubik's Dice'. Perhaps I'm clumsy, but It's awful: whenever I get
somewhere with it, I touch it a bit too hard, all the plates fall to the
bottom and I throw the thing back to the corner in disgustment. Opinions?)

But: does anyone have the number of configurations for it? I tried to count
them, and got something like 2.8 E 13, but very probably there are a few
factors of two or something missing. It's also a bit tricky to decide on when
two configurations are different. (I mean, should one count as different a
configuration reached by rotating, say, the top layer by 30 degrees? Sometimes,
yes, but sometimes it seems a bit funny to do so.)

Timo (tjj@rolf.helsinki.fi)