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Thistlethwaite's 52-move algorithm

Submitted by jaap on Wed, 04/19/2006 - 01:31.
I have put Thistlethwaite's 52-move algorithm on my site. This might be of historic interest to those of you who haven't seen a complete copy of it before.

David Singmaster had a copy that he scanned in, and put on his Singmaster CD6. That is a cd with all his notes and research on all kinds of recreational mathematics, which he makes available to anyone who is interested. I have converted those scans to text and put it all on my site.

Jaap
Jaap's Puzzle Page
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Nice topic, seems that people

Submitted by silviu on Wed, 04/19/2006 - 06:08.
Nice topic, seems that people have forgotten about him altough his methods were maybe the beginning of computer puzzling(or am I wrong?). Do you know what he does nowdays?
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According to Morwen B. Thistl

Submitted by jaap on Wed, 04/19/2006 - 06:32.
According to Morwen B. Thistlethwaite's homepage, he is at the university of Tennessee.

His work was one of the first analyses of the Rubik's Cube, but I'm sure he wasn't the only one doing it at that time. It was certainly the most successful and influential.

Using computers to analyse puzzles is much older than that. Solving the Towers of Hanoi or the Eight Queens Problem have been standard computer programming examples for recursion for years before that. I have no idea what the first puzzle is that was analysed with computer assistance.

[Edit:
One of the very first puzzles analysed by computer is the pentomino puzzle on an 8x8 board with its centre 2x2 missing, done in 1958 by Dana Scott:

Dana S. Scott (1958). "Programming a combinatorial puzzle". Technical Report No. 1, Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University.
]

Jaap
Jaap's Puzzle Page: http://www.geocities.com/jaapsch/puzzles/
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I have not met Morwen face to

Submitted by Jerry Bryan on Thu, 04/20/2006 - 08:07.
I have not met Morwen face to face, but I have corresponded with him in the last year or so. (I live in Knoxville, which is also where Morwen lives. He's at the university. I worked there many years ago, but I presently work at Pellissippi State Technical Community College, also in Knoxville). Anyway, he reported that he really had not worked on Rubik's cube since his seminal work many years ago. I don't think he realizes how famous he is in the Rubik's Cube world.
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