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A puzzle I couldn't solve for a year

cubers cracked it in an hour

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Dev here. I created a puzzle that looks like Rubik's cube but works differently. Instead of turning faces, closed bands of 12 stickers slide around the cube. Every scramble is solvable. I built on-device AI solvers that solve it in about 60 moves (sometimes substantially less than that)I'm not even a cuber so since I created it I've been thinking that no human can solve it. Until this Tuesday when I showed it to r/Cubers. It took them about an hour to find a solution. The first human solve was about 240 moves using mostly (how they call it) 4-move commutators: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cubers/comments/1vrq8zk/So my belief died, but a better question was born: nobody has a teachable method yet, let alone approaching 60 moves.The link is a 60-second browser demo. The math and the first recorded solve are at https://skimmiq.com/human-method/.I'm 60, not a professional programmer, and AI helped me create the puzzle and with the heavy math. Happy to answer anything.

HN · launched Aug 21, 2026 · 18 upvotes (top 27%) · 0 views

Niche: browser puzzle games · 310 launches, 26 in the last 7 days ▼ -7% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Media & entertainment
  • Dev tools
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 310 launches in browser puzzle games →

Could you build this?

Partial While the 3D puzzle UI is simple to create, developing an on-device heuristic solver for a novel permutation puzzle requires non-trivial combinatorial algorithms and group theory.

What it would actually take: The interactive 3D model can be implemented with Three.js or WebGL. The challenging component is modeling the state space of the sliding 12-sticker permutation puzzle and implementing an efficient solver (such as IDA* with pattern databases or Kociemba-like two-phase algorithms). This requires discrete mathematics, combinatorial search optimization, and efficient bitboard representations in WebAssembly.

Discussion

17 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Geranium (similar puzzle design), r/Cubers community puzzles

Concerns raised: Scramble is a paid feature, not free, Demo starts solved with no clear goal or win condition, Unclear instructions on how to solve, Difficult touchpad selection between tiles causes unintended rotations, Poor discoverability of game mechanics

Feature requests: Add scramble button to demo, Ignore clicks in gaps between tiles instead of rotating, Improve on-page explanation of solving objective, Better touchpad/cursor interaction for tile selection

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 511 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #177 of 512 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 296 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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