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After hearing about this paper which talks about the size of God's number for nxnxn cubes, I was thinking about what we currently know about God's algorithm for the 4x4x4 and realized that I couldn't seem to find any partial distance distributions on the 4x4x4 on the web.

So I've run my own analyses to get the number of positions up to 5 moves from the solved state. I have done this for six metrics. First, I have "single-slice" metrics where a move is only allowed to turn a single layer. Second, I have twist metrics where a move is only allowed to twist the cube along one plane. This is sometimes called face-turn metric because a face layer (possibly along with additional adjacent layers) is (are) turned with respect to the rest of the cube. Finally I also used what I termed "block turns" where some block of one or more adjacent layers (not necessarily including a face layer) are turned with respect to the rest of the cube. For each of these, I also considered whether or not a move must be restricted to quarter-turns only.