Jaap's Links to other puzzle pages
There are many puzzle pages about.
Many of my pages have links to sites relevant to that particular puzzle.
On this page I have drawn together the most important of them, together
with some more general links, in no particular order. Some links belong in
several sections and so are included more than once.
Pages which are in BOLD, have a
link back to these pages.
Official Puzzle Homepages
Other places to buy puzzles
Solution pages
Speed cubing
Blindfold cubing
Cube Theory
Cube
Art
Puzzle modification/building
Pages with programs to download
Pages with scripts or Java programs
Message boards
Musea, galleries and collections
Other neat permutation puzzle pages that are worth a mention
Pages that are not mainly about permutation puzzles
Favourite unrelated links
Official Puzzle Homepages:
Uwe Meffert's homepage.
He produces and sells many puzzles, including Pyraminx, Megaminx,
Pyramorphix, Skewb, Orbix and others. This site also has solutions for
some.
Rubik's homepage.
The official homepage sells Rubik's puzzles and has links to several cube
solutions on the web.
Tantrix homepage
is very nice as it has Java puzzles, and allows you to play in the online
Tantrix game tournaments.
Cmetrick by
elogIQ. My Cmetrick script is also on their page. Requires Flash, so click
here for
a their puzzles page.
Clever Toys make
wooden puzzles such as the Butterfly puzzle and many others.
Crossteaser homepage.
Requires Flash, so click
here
for their main page.
ThinkFun homepage,
the new name of the
Binary Arts, the makers of such puzzles as Topspin, Turnstile, Spinout,
Nineball, Port to Port and others.
Masterball homepage.
You can buy a masterball here. It also has a solution for the rainbow
masterball.
Hockeypuck homepage.
This only shows the different styles available.
Tiger Toys, the
manufacturers of many electronic games including Lights Out. A subsidiary
of Hasbro.
Mag-Nif, the
manufacturer of The Brain, Saturn and other puzzles.
The Brainball homepage
is in German, but has move sequences and puzzles.
Other places to buy puzzles:
Ebay is a large online
auction site. To search for Rubik's puzzles, then
click here.
Hendrik Haak's Shop.
Excellent range of puzzles to buy, and an amazing museum too. Based in
Germany.
Kadon Enterprises
Inc. sells Instant Insanity, make and sell polyominoes and many
other neat puzzles.
PuzzleMan
(Viktor Genel) has lots of beautifully well-made wooden assembly/disassembly
puzzles for sale, as well as a shareware puzzle game to download.
PuckPuzzles
is a site that sells many types of Hockey Puck puzzles.
PuzzleAtomic is
Douglas Engel's site, where he sells many different types of circle
puzzle.
Arabesk sell many
puzzles and interesting or amusing playthings.
Bits and Pieces
sell many puzzles. No Rubik-type puzzles though, but lots of others such
as puzzle rings and disassembly puzzles.
PottyPuzzles
sells many of the wooden assembly puzzles by Trench Puzzles
here.
Puzzles Down
Under sells many kinds of puzzles. One of the few sources for
Chromoballs.
Math 'n' Stuff
sells mostly maths teaching aids, but also some games and puzzles.
Solution pages:
Courtney McFarren's Site has solutions to the cube, skewb, square
1, Rubik's Magic (both sizes) amongst others, and lots of other
interesting and funny stuff.
Jasmine's Page of Stuff has a very good beginner's solution to the
Rubik's cube.
RubiksCube.Info
by Josef Jelinek contains corners first solving algorithms. Also has
pictures of Hana Bizek's cube art. This site supercedes their
old site even though
that is still online.
Twisty Puzzles
has a 3x3x3 cube solution
here which explains a method to solve middle layer edges together with
the top layer corners in pairs. This page also has a highly recommended
message forum.
Chris
Hardwick's Page. This page has solutions for the cube and the
Rubik's Revenge. There is also The Unofficial World Records Page here
where you can log your best times.
World of Rubik's
by Bruno Jarno. A French page, which has a bit of just about everything
about the Rubik's cube.
Christophe Goudey's
Cube Page has lots of fascinating stuff about the cube, and an
excellent links page.
Dennis Palaganas' page has solutions for Alexander's Star,
Turnstile, Rubik's Revenge, 5x5x5 Cube, and Skewb.
Juergen Koeller's page. A solution to the cube and rubik's magic
amongst many other things, also available in German.
Cyril
Castella's page. A French solution to the cube, domino, square-1
and more.
Elías Hernández Capdevila's page is in Spanish, and has solutions
to Square 1 and the 5x5x5 cube.
Bigcubes has
solutions for big cubes, i.e. the 4×4×4 and 5×5×5.
François Aime's website
is in French but shows a clear graphical layer solution to the cube.
Cubic Puzzles - The SIMPLEST Solutions. A text based page with
solutions for the Skewb, Pyraminx, NxNxN Cubes, Megaminx, Octahedron and
Rubik's Clock.
Denny
Dedmore's solutions for various cube sizes. Now that Denny has stopped,
these pages are being hosted by Georges Helm.
Philip
Marshall's Cube Page has a solutions for size 2, 3, 4 and 5 cubes, as
well as the megaminx. His cube solution solves edges first, and then the
corners and is relatively simple.
Matthew Monroe's page. Nice illustrated solutions for cube,
professor's cube, square-one and Pyraminx.
PuzzleSolver by
Jake Olefsky has nice solutions for the cube, minicube, the pyraminx, and
the Brain. Also has neat impossible objects, and a
message board
Anzu's Puzzle Solution Page has solutions to the pyraminx and all cube
sizes.
Jacob
Davenport's page. He has a text based 5x5x5 cube solution
here.
Chris Eggermont's Twisted Mind Games. The highlights of this page are
the solution to Rubik's Magic Master Edition, and the pages on how to get
the Square-1 Puzzle into cube shape.
Luciani's Page
is a nice looking French site with a solution.
Steve
Martin's page has a solution to Nintendo's Ten Billion Barrel puzzle.
Nerd Paradise has
solutions for the Cube, Pyraminx, Square-1, and lots of other stuff too.
Ryan
Kagin's "How to solve the cube" has a layer solution.
R.
Hoffman's site has a one-page solution.
Ronald
Bieber's page is in German, and has a cube solution of the layer type,
and also a
Rubik's Magic page.
Cubo
Magico, a Spanish page with a corners first solution of the cube.
Another
Spanish cube solution.
Yet another Spanish cube site.
Adam's
World has a Skewb solution
here.
Mark Jeays' page
has a simple solution, and answers to many common questions.
Speed solving:
Speedsolving Rubik's Cube Club. A message board, part of Yahoo's
GroupsS.
SpeedCubing.com
has good lists of sequences for speedsolving the cube, similar to Jiri's,
and a Java program that can searches for useful sequences. The site also
hosts the sites of
Chris Hardwick
(which has speedcubing videos and links) and
Ton Dennenbroek.
Peter Jansen's
speedcubing page also has many extremely good speedcubing move
sequences, some with video. Now hosted by
SpeedCubing.com.
Lars Petrus' site. A
great set of pages that show you how to solve the cube fast without having
to memorise 100 sequences. Also available in
Italian.
Jessica Fridrich's page. A very fast layer algorithm for the cube.
Gilles Roux's page
has a very different speedcubing method, and some fun video's on his site.
Dan Knights' page. Speed cubing with video's, lubrication,
avoiding injury, blindfold cubing, amusing quotes.
Jon (NascarJon)
Morris's site has Java applets showing all move sequences for a
quick layer method.
Planet Puzzle
by Katsuyuki Konishi (Japanese).
Dan's Cube
Station also hosts the Fewest Moves Challenge.
Cubefreak
by Shotaro "Macky" Makisumi, a very talented young speedcuber.
Stephan
Pochmann has a Rubik's Clock speed-solving page.
Lars Vandenbergh's site has a Square-1 speed-solving page.
Acubist is a speed-skewbing
site.
Stiff_hands' website is all about speedcubing, blindfold cubing, and
lots more.
Jess Bonde's site has
videos of various people speedsolving the cube as well as videos of good
move sequences and a
cube timer
that gives random positions to solve and calculates average time.
Bernard
Helmtetter's page has all possible top layer algorithms you may ever
need.
Adam Cheyer's Cube Solution is optimised for visual speed.
The Rokumentai
is by Masayuki Akimoto, who has an unusual but fast method for the larger
cubes.
Zbigniew
Zborowski's page shows his method where the last layer edges are
oriented when the last corner/edge pair is placed in the first two layers.
Ryan Heise's site
shows another original method.
Doug Li's
site is not finished but looks very promising.
Andy Camann's site
has some great speedcubing tips.
Justin Vining's site has video's of many moves for the last layer.
Blindfold solving:
Richard Carr's page is all about his blindfold cubing techniques.
Grant Tregay's
page has one walk-through of a blindfold solve, and various solving
video's.
Stiff_hands' website has a great
blindfold cubing section.
Cube Theory:
Prof. David Joyner's Homepage. His section on permutation puzzles
has a lot of interesting maths, but much of it is too complicated for the
non-mathematician.
Cube-Lovers Archive. The original archive at MIT died, but it has now
been preserved here.
Martin Schoenert's page has the cube-lovers archive in html form,
though only 1980-1996.
Mark Longridge's
Domain of the Cube has a few good text pages with cube theory, a
large list of patterns, and a neat selection of links.
How to Solve Almost Any Rubik-like Puzzle. A short explanation of the
concepts of conjugation and commutation.
Glenn Rhoads' Fun Page. Has lots of fun stuff, including a few for the
cube including
Solve ANY Rubik's type puzzle, a very short text explaining a general
algorithm to solve many puzzles.
Introduction to Group Theory ends with a section on the Rubik's cube.
Peter Suber's page about the 'inductive game', i.e. exactly undoing as
many random moves as possible.
Oskar
Enoksson's page has an article
here about Golombs observation that the cube corner twist is like
quarks in particle physics.
Jesper Gerved's page
shows his letter to David Singmaster in which he lists the orders of all
the elements of the cube group.
The
wikipedia has an entry on the Rubik's Cube.
Charles Tsai analyses an unusual way to solve the cube which he
hoped would use few moves.
Ryan Heise developed an unusual way to solve the cube based on
Thistlethwaite's algorithm.
Cube Art:
Kristin Wunderlich and Jacob Davenport's page has some wonderful cube
art
here. It has a few patterns on a single 5x5x5 cube, and many mosaic
patterns using a large array of cubes. Kristin also makes cubes with other
designs
here.
Hana Bizek's
pages have pictures of her cube art. These are mainly large cubes made
from many smaller ones. This is part of the
RubiksCube.Info
site.
Zarf's Page also has cubes with different designs
here.
Philip K's Puzzle Page has cubes with Escher designs.
Fred Holly's Cube
designs are mozaics made from regular Rubik's cubes.
Puzzle modification/building:
Ton
Dennenbroek's page shows many puzzle mods in various stages of
construction.
Twisty Puzzles
has several articles dealing with building puzzles from plastic resin.
This page also has a highly recommended
message forum.
Mark Longridge's
Domain of the Cube shows some of his puzzle building efforts on
his
prototypes page.
3D puzzle
reconstruction studio (Japanese). Katsuhiko Okamoto designs, builds
and sells many new puzzles. Expensive, but worth it for such quality.
Jin "Time
Traveller" Kim's page has a small section on puzzle building.
Pages with programs to download:
Cube Explorer
Page. This program by Herbert Kociemba produces move sequences for
any cube pattern. It finds a reasonably short sequence in about two
seconds, and given a few more minutes will nearly always produce a
sequence of less than 20 moves.
GabbaSoft
has a very nice Rubik's Cube simulation, with cubes of any size up to
20×20×20.
Mike Reid's optimal solver can do a very fast and deep search for
solutions (uncompiled C source only).
PuzzleMan
(Viktor Genel) has a fascinating shareware puzzle game to download, like a
cross between a sliding puzzle and Rubik's Magic.
Jozef Jelinek's
site has a program that searches for optimal solutions, with the
possibility of ignoring parts of the cube.
Cyril Castella's Genetic Cube Solver, solves the cube using a
genetic algorithm. It is slow, but this program is a remarkable
achievement.
Puzzler
by Noel Dillabough is a great Windows program that simulates many puzzles.
Superliminal has an excellent simulation of a 4-d rubik's cube, i.e. a
3x3x3x3 cube.
Larry's Cube Corner gives us the excellent Hungarian HexaHedron
simulator.
Cellosoft have a Rubik's Rings game for Windows. Looks nice, but it
requires a Pentium and 2Mb disk space which is a bit much for such a
simple game.
Japanese page,
with a megaminx program amongst others.
Ishihama Yoshiaki's page, has lots of puzzles and simulations.
Ken
Silverman (programmer of Duke3D fame) also once wrote a cube
simulator. It does any size, and recently a solver by Ben Jos Walbeehm has
been added.
Gliding Cube is a
rubik's cube where each loop of 12 tiles can slide around like the Equator
puzzle. Trial version available.
Tom
Davis has a nice cube simulation with solver and macro facility, for
use in
group theory.
RubikSim is
an open source 3D Rubik's Cube Simulator which uses OpenGL.
2x2x2 Cube Solver,
for Windows, simply has a 20Mb database with all the solutions.
Cube Solver,
a Windows program that solves the cube step by step using a layer method.
3d Cube
program for windows, by Mohaemen Giali.
Pages with scripts or Java programs:
Karl
Hornell's Rubik Unbound. The most used Java cube on the net, and it
has become the standard on which others are judged. With source.
AnimCube by Jozef Jelinek is for displaying move sequences. With
source.
Dan
Knights' Java cube is now on the official Rubik's homepage. It is a
beautiful 3x3x3 cube with edit and playback facility. Unfortunately the
built-in solver is disabled - you are expected to pay for it!
Ron's Cube Solver from SpeedCubing.com can search for useful
sequences, using only some moves or ignoring some pieces.
Wendel
Randelshofer's site has a Java cube which can not only turn, but
also 'explode' to show the inside. There is also Cube Twister, a neat cube
analysis program, many pretty patterns and more.
Mark Sunter-Storey's site has a several Java puzzles, including a
Cube, Tricky Disky, and others.
Ganpuzzle has a
Java games for various Rubik's Cubes, Square-1, and Nineball.
Jess Bonde's page has
a cube timer
that gives random positions to solve and calculates average time.
4D Cube by Don Hatch is a java applet version of
Superliminal's 3x3x3x3 cube.
Raymond Penner's
Page. There are neat Java programs here for Rubik's Fifteen and
Rubik's Clock amongst others.
Wedran's cube solver.
It allows you to edit a cube and then it shows you the moves to solve it,
using a corners first method of about 120 moves on average.
David Byrden's Twisty
puzzles. A page with Java versions of many puzzles, including all
platonic solids.
Rob's Rubix Repair. An interesting page which solves the cube for you.
It works on all browsers that support tables with coloured cells, there is
no need for Java. Unfortunately it uses a lot of moves to solve it. With
source.
Michael Schubart's
cube. 3x3x3 cube with views of other faces. With source.
David Barr's applet. Any cube size. Cube shown in a way that takes
some getting used to.
Yuh-Jye
(Michael) Chang's cube. Any cube size. Built-in solver just undoes
previous moves.
Bob
Breid's page has a Javascript Rubik's Cube.
Ishihama Yoshiaki's page, has lots of Java puzzles and simulations
here, amongst which a 4d rubik's cube, and several very original 3d
puzzles.
Crépeau-Nguyen's ultimate solver. Java programs that look up God's
algorithm for the pocket cube, domino, pyraminx and all skewb puzzles.
CheesyGames has
many neat Java games and puzzles.
www.kielack.de
has several Javascript games, including a version of Rotos
here.
AardAsNails
Solftware has a Java cube, pyraminx, and dino cube.
EvilTron has a beautiful Rubik's cube in Flash. It is 1.5 Mb, but well
worth the wait. Plays a neat song if you solve it.
Message boards:
Speedsolving Rubik's Cube Club. Highly active speedcubing club
founded by Chris Hardwick. Part of Yahoo's Groups.
Twisty Puzzles
forum. Excellent forum, with a good community.
Cube
Lovers forum. Discussions on the mathematics of the cube.
RubiKlub is a French message board founded by Bruno Jarno. Part of
Yahoo France Groups.
Deutscher Speedcubing Club is a German speedcubing message board. Part
of Yahoo Germany Groups.
PuzzleSolver's message board.
Musea, galleries and collections:
Hendrik Haak's Puzzle Museum. Large number of fascinating puzzles,
many of which I would love to have in my collection.
TwistyPuzzles.com, formerly the Virtual Puzzle Museum, shows a
huge number of different versions of the cube and other puzzles.
Ton
Dennenbroek's site shows not only his puzzle modifications, but
also his huge collection.
Passion for
Puzzles (formerly PuzzlePassion) by Marcel van Leeuwen is a very
nice looking site with a small but interesting collection.
Alvaro Ibanez's puzzle collection, with his solving times. In
Spanish.
Planet Puzzle
by Katsuyuki Konishi (Japanese).
Joshua Bell's collection
Cubomania, Bruno's collection.
Milan Vodicka's site shows his varied puzzle collection.
Rob Stegmann has a varied puzzle gallery neatly categorised.
Juan Roure
is a Spanish collector and speedsolver.
Laurent Blanc's
site shows a large collection
Raoul Raba's
homepage, contains images of his first Rotascope patent and of many of
his designs.
Kevin Moore's page, has a nice page with pictures and descriptions of
various puzzles.
Maarten Vermaak's page has descriptions and pictures of all Rubik's
puzzles, even the rare ones, as well as many others.
Machan's
site (Japanese) with pictures of various puzzles, but actually most
notable for the neat hit counter.
Kar
Watanabe's pages (Japanese) with a picture gallery.
Japanese
site with many pictures of puzzles and their packaging.
Peter Knoppers' Puzzle Collection consists mostly of assembly puzzles.
Chosi's homepage
has a huge and very varied collection.
Thomas'
site has pictures of a good variety of puzzles. In German.
Don Harper's site has many pictures of cubes.
Das Puzzleum (German)
is a museum with all kinds of puzzles.
Casses-têtes en folie
(French) has a large gallery of puzzles of many kinds.
Other neat permutation puzzle pages that
are worth a mention:
Gilles Roux's page
has many amusing videos featuring the cube.
Joshua Bell's page has a very interesting info on the patents of
puzzles like the Rubik's Cube.
Mike
Reid's page has a lot of rubik's cube information and links.
Matthew
Baker's Lights Out page has lots of good info about the Lights Out
game and its variants, including the cube version.
Cubism For Fun is
the newsletter of the Dutch Cube Club (NKC), which is still going strong
after more than 20 years.
Georges Helm's Page.
Has a list of cube literature, resources, and links.
Rubik's Cube World Records lists some amazing world records.
Gaétan
Guimond's page is in French (and some English), and shows his TV
exploits as well as his corners first solving method.
J. Brown's
Page describes a robot to solve the cube made from
Lego MindStorms.
Jin "Time
Traveller" Kim's page has the Puzzle FAQ, now in
version
9.
Hong Chen's Page
has pictures and video of the cube and of a puzzleball.
Javier Santos' page. A Spanish page with some interesting puzzles,
including a solution to Rubik's Magic.
Miroslav Kolar's
page is all about the Tower of Hanoi. Has a large number of links, and
lots of different algorithms and source codes for solving it.
Chris Lohe's
page shows the very difficult Labyrinth cube, a Rubik's Cube
variation.
Pages that are not mainly about
permutation movement puzzles:
Puzzle
World, by John Rausch, is the portal site for assembly/disassembly
puzzles as well as sliding piece puzzles. Also has Stewart Coffin's books
available to download.
PuzzleMan
has lots of wooden assembly/disassembly puzzles for sale.
Creative
Puzzles a neat page that hosts the alt.brain.teasers archive and
has Java games too.
Juergen Koeller's page has lots of fun stuff besides some Rubik's
pages, much of it in German and English.
ClickMazes has an
excellent set of Java puzzles, all of them mazes in the most general sense
of the word.
The Puzzle Museum
has other types of mechanical puzzles as well.
The rec.puzzles archives
maintained by Arlet Otten.
Ed Pegg's Mathpuzzle page
has lots of difficult but often fascinating mathematical puzzles.
Ken Duisenberg's
Puzzle of the Week has hard mathematical puzzles, with an archive of
all the previous weekly puzzles.
rec.puzzles UseNet group.
Pentomino site
by a school that uses them for teaching, and includes regular competitions.
Favourite unrelated links:
sci.math UseNet group.
Sloane's On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences includes the "God's
Algorithm" sequences I calculated.
Mathematical surfaces built from Lego.
Pedagoguery Software has
some neat programs, including a gorgeous polyhedron viewer.
Apothecary's Corner, by Ray Girvan, has a fascinating collection
of weird and wonderful links.
Slashdot, News for
Nerds, Stuff that matters.
Need to Know, *the*
weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk.
The Register.
Biting the hand that feeds IT.
Groklaw, technology
and the law.
Dilbert daily office
cartoon.
Bob the Angry Flower
weekly cartoon.
Penny Arcade
regular cartoon.
Justin B.
Rye's site about SF Xenolinguistics, SF chronophysics, Esperanto, Star
Trek, and more.
Kartoo is a (meta)search
engine with a neat graphical display of connected results.