The Soma Cube brings back memories.

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Piet Hein

Piet Hein (1905-1996) was an extraordinary Danish inventor, mathematician, poet and philosopher. He invented theSoma Cube puzzle1933年。几年前，我写了一篇有关Hein和他的作品的博客文章，Soma Cube 2016.

The Soma Cube puzzle has seven pieces. One of them is a V-shaped piece made from three cubelets. The other six pieces are L, T, Z, R, S, and Y with four cubelets each. That's a total of 27 cubelets, just enough to make a 3-by-3-by-3 cube. Sound familiar?

比尔·麦基曼

比尔·麦基曼and I were buddies in grad school. He was a professor at U. C. Santa Cruz for a while, and then at the ill-fated Wang Institute of Graduate Studies in Tyngsborough, Mass. He worked for DEC in New Hampshire for a long time, taught compilers at Dartmouth, and even consulted for the MathWorks. As an exercise to learn MATLAB, he wrote the modern version of our为什么command.

The originalsoma演示

Bill and I became obsessed with the Soma cube after Martin Gardiner described the puzzle in his科学美国人column. You may not have noticed it before, but one of Bill's programs,soma, is in the MATLAB演示sdirectory. Bill generated all of the 240 distinctly different puzzle solutions and stored them in a 240-by-27 matrix,演示s/somasols. His program lets you page through the solutions.

A newSoma演示

My newSomacode uses technology fromqube, the digital Rubik's Cube simulator, to plot the 240 solutions. Here are the seven Soma pieces, surrounding an animation stepping through every tenth solution.

Do you recognize the colors?

软件

Soma可从this link. You already havesomasols, but another copy is available fromthis link.

更新

I have combined my new display code and McKeeman's old program that finds all the solutions. The self-extracting archive is available at>

获取MATLAB代码

Published with MATLAB® R2022b