From cube-lovers-errors@mc.lcs.mit.edu Wed Nov 12 22:54:25 1997 Return-Path: Received: from sun30.aic.nrl.navy.mil by mc.lcs.mit.edu (8.8.1/mc) with SMTP id WAA01970; Wed, 12 Nov 1997 22:54:25 -0500 (EST) Precedence: bulk Errors-To: cube-lovers-errors@mc.lcs.mit.edu Mail-from: From richard_morton@icom-solutions.com Wed Nov 12 04:56:12 1997 Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 17:31:37 GMT From: David Singmaster To: Anders.Larsson@hvi.uu.se Cc: cube-lovers@ai.mit.edu Message-Id: <009BD319.4B14FD66.61@ice.sbu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Colour arrangements (Was: Re: Megaminx, the 10-spot and GAP) The colour arrangement on the early Hungarian cubes was quite random!! I even have two examples where two faces have the same colour!! It was not until about 1980 that the idea of having a standardised colour pattern was adopted and the most common was to have the opposite faces differ by yellow. That is the opposite faces were White - Yellow, Blue - Green, Red - Orange. Rubik went to some effort to select six colours that would be maximally distinct, but I think the yellow, red and orange tended to be too close in the sense that either the orange was too close to the red or too close to the yellow! However, this does not completely determine the colour pattern. Just as with a die, there are two possible arrangements. Conway and Guy etc. observed that Blue, Orange and Yellow meet at a corner and they can occur clockwise or counterclockwise, spelling BOY or YOB. Some people have expressly asked me for one form rather than the other! An early anecdote, from about 1979. A friend's son was trying to help another friend solve his cube over the telephone. This is a pretty formidable task at the best of times, but their two cubes had different colour patterns, so the son was making statements like: turn the red face, that's blue on your cube, .... DAVID SINGMASTER, Professor of Mathematics and Metagrobologist School of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics Southbank University, London, SE1 0AA, UK. Tel: 0171-815 7411; fax: 0171-815 7499; email: zingmast or David.Singmaster @sbu.ac.uk