Hacker News Reader

ashdnazgon Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?

I was indeed talking about the implementation and the algorithm as described in the article (prior to the recent edit updating the definition of L).

That Shamir's algorithm is correct was never in question.

ashdnazgon Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?

At the moment the algorithm seems to only check for exactly 20 move solutions, so it won't find them easily. You would however find the optimal solution followed by some silly back and forth that can be identified, as long as the optimal one isn't 19 moves.

ashdnazgon Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?

If I'm not mistaken, this algorithm doesn't result in an optimal solution.

You can see that in the example in the end, a random cube resulted in a 20 move solution, which is the upper bound for any solution [0]. There are not many cube configurations that require such a long solution and the chance that we hit one randomly (and solved it that quickly) is incredibly small.

In order to make this algorithm optimal, you'd need to do iterative deepening, trying to find solutions of length 1, 2, etc. up until 20.

[0] https://www.cube20.org/

ashdnazgon Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg (2011)

I think you mean this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#...

ashdnazgon Understanding Bloom filters by building one

I've used Bloom filters in a Battlecode [1] AI. We had a shared array where reads and writes are expensive, so a bloom filter was used in order to not waste time on writing something that's already written there.

[1] https://battlecode.org/

ashdnazgon Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face

https://www.timesofisrael.com/hebrew-university-to-open-acad...

From 2016 - "The university is mired in debt amounting to nearly NIS 13 billion ($3.4 billion) over employees’ pensions."