der Mouse <mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> writes:
>In my opinion mechanical designs for the 7 and above will have to be
>fundamentally different from those for the 6 and below, because that's
>the point at which the "buried" corner of a corner cubie extends past
>the surface of the face during a face turn and thus it's not possible
>to build the thing as rigid pieces connected to a central mechanism, at
>least not without cutting away part of some face-center cubies.
>(Specifically, that buried corner is at sqrt(2)*(.5-1/N) from the
>center, taking the cube side as 1 and N as the order of the cube. The
>face is at .5 from the center. The former becomes greater than the
>latter at about N=6.83...not that non-integer N make physical sense.)
There's a really simple solution to this. Just don't make the 7 slices
evenly spaced.
-- Wei-Hwa Huang, whuang@cco.caltech.edu, http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~whuang/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Caught Porfiry, Raskolnikov sung his swan Sonia when he went Dounia to Siberia.