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I recently completed a complete breadth-first search of the subgroup of the 3x3x3 cube defined only by the edge cubies. In other words, think of a cube where all the corner cubies are indistinguishable, and a state is defined only by the edge cubies. It took about 35 days on a dual-processor workstation, with three terabytes of disk storage. This was done without any use of symmetries. Here's the number of unique states at each depth:

0 1
1 18
2 243
3 3240
4 42807
5 555866
6 7070103
7 87801812
8 1050559626

Recently I finished my diploma thesis. It's about Hume, a program I wrote for evaluating human solving methods for twisty puzzles. The main goal is to let the user describe a method in a minimal way so that new method ideas can be tested quickly and with ease. The program fills in all the dirty work. So far it's less powerful than I'd like it to be, but I'm happy with what I got from it so far, and I'm happy with my thesis (my professor liked it very much, too, which made me even happier). The thesis is online now, the program will follow soon:
http://stefan-pochmann.info/hume/

Cheers!
Stefan