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From: roger.broadie@iclweb.com (Roger Broadie)
To: "Cube Lovers (E-mail)" <Cube-Lovers@ai.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: Keyboard cube [was: Re: Wrist pains]
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 21:57:13 +0100

For anyone who is interested in trying out a simulator that can be
operated in an instant-response keyboard mode, I have christened my
web-pages by uploading a copy of my cube simulator.  In this mode, the
function keys do face, centre-slice and whole-cube turns for the
3x3x3, and alphabetic keys can also be used for the same purpose.

L, U, F and R are assigned to F5 to F8, so it's reasonably easy to
work up a rhythm.  Squares and inverses are done with Shift and
Control, though as Jerry Bryan pointed out repeated jabbing is at
least as easy.  These keys also work for 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 cubes, with
the alphabetic keys b f u d l r used for the off-centre slices.

I mainly wrote the simulator to show me the effects of turns in
Singmaster notation and common variants such as are found in
cube-lovers.  It's in Qbasic, which is the limit of my knowledge, and
is a lot less sophisticated in appearance than the simulators
available on the web - no mouse operations and no nice visible turning
of the layers while you watch for instance, and distinctly rudimentary
interactions with external files - so I am not offering it to the
world in general, but it does have some features I haven't seen
elsewhere that may appeal to Cube-lovers readers.

Among them are that it can be set to show the effect of the turns on
the centre pieces: it shows their orientation as little clock-hands
that point to 12 o'clock in their home positions.  The orientation of
each piece's pointer then allows its identity to be deduced.  I don't
really feel I've understood the effects of a sequence unless I can see
what it does to the centres.

Also (this is a party trick, really) it can be set to work as a cube
with any number of pieces per edge from two to 15, using an extension
of normal Singmaster notation - no keyboard mode for these cubes.

The program can be downloaded from

    home.iclweb.com/icl1/roger.broadie

I won't necessarily keep it there all that long.

Roger Broadie