Idea: Cooperative solving of huge puzzles

[ChristopherKing42]

I have a idea for the next big eSport (well, maybe not big eSport, but I would watch it). Imagine a puzzle with a huge number of faces (say 200 faces). Each team of 2 to 20 people gets an instance of this puzzle, and whoever solves it first wins! The two instances of the puzzle are also shown on a huge TVs!

You could also imagine a 10,000 face puzzle, and have the viewers of a youtube channel (such as Mathologer) solve it together.

How it would work is that someone can setup a server, and people connect to it (you can either filter the connections, like in the first example, or not in the second (moderators could disable connections in the second case though)). People can then rotate the puzzle (which only occurs on their own screen) and make moves (which occurs on all the screens).

You would also want to label the faces with pairs of Greek letters (or some other symbols), because many of the colors will be similar.

This could theoretically be done with elliptic, euclidean, or hyperbolic puzzles. Although I think hyperbolic would the funniest for the participants (since there is less distance to move the cubies), euclidean would be the best spectator sport. For elliptic, you would need something like this, but bigger. For hyperbolic, the audience would need to don their head set and hop into Hyperbolic VR. For Euclidean, you can just have a normal flat display.

[roice3]

Cool idea @ChristopherKing42 :) Sounds like you are imagining a competition that would go on for a very long time! It has me wondering if there might be some way to parallelize solves, allowing multiple team members to work in very different areas of the puzzle at the same time. Supporting that would be an interesting programming challenge.

You might consider posting your idea to the 4D_Cubing group as well. I bet some of the other members would give interesting commentary on it.

[ChristopherKing42]

The idea is that the server would makes sure the puzzle is in a consistent state. Also, as team members don't turn adjacent faces, it doesn't matter in what order the moves are applied (if they are, the server can either apply then in an arbitrary order, or only apply one of them. Generally though, team members would avoid that).

[ChristopherKing42]

Yahoo Groups Discussion