Twentyseven
Rubik's cube solver in Haskell.
Inspired by Herbert Kociemba's Cube Explorer.
The main idea is to precompute, for every configuration, the number of moves
required to put certain subsets of the 27 cubies composing the 3x3 Rubik's cube
in their right place or in the right orientation. This gives lower bounds
used for an A⋆-like search in the graph of scrambled cubes.
Two algorithms are available in Twentyseven:
- the two-phase solver, which is suboptimal but fast: it solves 1000 random cubes (uniformly distributed) in one minute;
- the optimal solver, which is quite slow, taking between five minutes and two hours to solve a random cube (18 moves in average).
The lookup tables for the two-phase solver take ten seconds to compute and weigh 13MB,
compare that to about four hours and 2GB for the optimal solver!
(Timed on a i7-10750H.)
A compressed archive ts-tables.tar.gz (720MB) of all precomputed tables is
available on Google Drive; see instructions at the bottom.
Usage summary
twentyseven [-p] [--strict] [-d DIR] [--optimal]
- For the first invocation, use
-p to precompute nonexistent lookup tables,
otherwise an error is thrown when twentyseven tries to load them;
--strict loads tables immediately, otherwise they are loaded "by need";
-d DIR specifies the directory where the tables should be read and written
(default: $HOME/.27/).
For more options:
twentyseven --help
The input is read line by line.
A line can be one of:
-
A string of 54 characters (ignoring spaces) from a set of (almost any) 6
characters. Each character then corresponds to the color of one facelet, in
the order illustrated below.
Output: a sequence of moves to unscramble it.
In the following figure, facelets are numbered in base 9. Faces 0,1,2,3,4,5 correspond to U,L,F,R,B,D.
00 01 02
03 04 05
06 07 08
10 11 12 20 21 22 30 31 32 40 41 42
13 14 15 23 24 25 33 34 35 43 44 45
16 17 18 26 27 28 36 37 38 46 47 48
50 51 52
53 54 55
56 57 58
-
A dot . followed by a sequence of moves to scramble the cube.
The basic moves are given by a letter in [ULFRBD], or their lowercase
counterparts. Each letter corresponds to a clockwise quarter turn of the
given face (up, left, front, right, back, down). The orientation is
determined when looking directly at the turning face.
For every basic move, an optional suffix [23'] allows to specify a half
turn (e.g., U2), equivalent to a sequence of two quarter turns (UU), or a
counterclockwise quarter turn (e.g., U3 or U') equivalent to a sequence
of three clockwise (UUU).
Output: a description of the resulting cube if the moves are applied starting
from the solved cube (in the format above, with letters ULFRBD as
colors).
-
The keyword random.
Output: a random solvable cube with uniform distribution.
-
The keyword quit (or an end-of-file) terminates the interactive session.
Example
Initialization
$ twentyseven -p --strict < /dev/null
Example
examples.txt:
qwqwqwqwq erererere tytytytyt rerererer ytytytyty wqwqwqwqw
qwqwqwqwq erqrerere tytytytyt rerererer ytytytyty wqwqwqwqw
BBBBUBBBB UUUULUUUU RRRRFRRRR DDDDRDDDD LLLLBLLLL FFFFDFFFF
DDDFUDLRB FUFDLLLRR UBLBFDFUD ULBFRULLB RRRLBBRUB UBFFDFDRU
111121111 333313333 222232222 444454444 666646666 555565555
111111214 223222222 131333333 344444444 555555555 666666666
.udddlrrrbfffuddd
random
The output then looks like this:
$ twentyseven < examples.txt
U2 D2 L2 R2 F2 B2
Facelets [6,18,11] ("qtq") do not match any regular cubie.
U D F B L R U2 R2 F2 R2 U2 L2 B2 U' D' B2
U L B' L R2 D R U2 F U2 L2 B2 U B2 D' B2 U' R2 U L2 R2 U
U D L R F B U2 B2 L2 F2 D2 B2 R2 U' D' L2
L U' F2 U F2 U L U' L2 D F2 D' F2
BBBBUBBBB UUUULUUUU RRRRFRRRR DDDDRDDDD LLLLBLLLL FFFFDFFFF
BDLLUFBUD LBUBLURFL RLBFFBFRU RLFURULRR UBDRBRDDU DFBDDDFLF
Detail of heuristics
The distance estimations are based on the following projections of the cube state.
Two-phase
Phase 1
- Corner Orientation × UD Slice
- Edge Orientation × UD Slice
It is possible to store the actual distances to the goal set in phase 1 to
make it even faster, but the two phase algorithm is fairly quick already.
Phase 2
- Corner Permutation × UD Slice Permutation (Phase 2)
- UD Edge Permutation (Phase 2) × UD SlicePermutation (Phase 2)
Optimal
- Corner Orientation × Edge Orientation
× XY Slice Permutation, for XY in {UD, LR, FB}
- Corner Orientation × Corner Permutation
Download the tables
If you can't wait four hours to precompute the optimal tables,
you can download them from Google Drive.
Pray to the Google gods that the URL still works.
There are checksums for the archive as well as the uncompressed files in ts-tables.sha256.
# 1. This command prints a Google Drive URL (drive.usercontent.google.com) where you can download ts-tables.tar.gz
sh print-ts-tables-url.sh twentyseven
# 2. Download ts-tables.tar.gz
# 3. The checksums should match
sha256sum ts-tables.tar.gz
tail -1 ts-tables.sha256
# 4. Unpack tables into ~/.27
mkdir ~/.27
mv ts-tables.tar.gz ~/.27
cd ~/.27
tar zxf ts-tables.tar.gz
