Bibliography

I know it's not traditional, but I'd like to start with a combined history and bibliography.

The original Rubik's Cube came out when I was in junior high school. I never came close to solving it myself, I just cheated and learned the solution from this short book.

[SS] The Simple Solution to Rubik's Cube

Once I was able to solve the cube, and thus able to recover from all the mistakes I made that left it totally scrambled, I liked to mess around with it and find ways to make pretty patterns. Most of the pattern ideas came from this other short book

[CG] Cube Games

Eventually, after maybe a year or two, I lost interest in the cube, but I came back to it maybe two or three times later on. One of those times, I think, was when I ran across the following item.

[MT] Metamagical Themas chapter Magic Cubology

The next chapter of that book, On Crossing the Rubicon, is about generalizations from cubes to other shapes. You'd think I'd be interested in that, or in the four-dimensional generalizations that exist on line, but apparently I'm not. I am interested in generalizations to other sizes, but only marginally. I have a 2×2×2 cube, a 4×4×4, and a 5×5×5, but none of them are much good for making patterns—the first is too small (not enough canvas) and the other two are too large (too many pieces to place). The other two are also hard to turn, but that could probably be fixed.

I ran across the next item at some point too, but I didn't appreciate its virtues until recently.

[WW] Winning Ways chapter Pursuing Puzzles Purposefully