Latest Puzzle

Latest App

Older Puzzles Only For Computers

Lollipop: a 2D puzzle that contains all possible pieces twisted by all subsets of axes.

RefleCube: a Magic Cube allowing only reflection moves rather than twisting moves, or both.

Clockwork Cube: a Magic Cube on which the rotation of all the slices are correlated.

About Me

My name is Nan Ma. On many online forums I use the name "schuma" because I am a big fan of Michael Schumacher.

I am enthusastic about all the puzzles similar to the Rubik's Cube. They are called Twisty Puzzles on the Twistypuzzles forum. I have solved

• All of the puzzles on gelatinbrain's Virtual Magic Polyhedra. See the scoreboard.
• Many four-dimensional puzzles, including the tessaract MC4D, 120-cell, 24-cell, and a simplified 600-cell using Magic Puzzle Ultimate. I have solved 2x2x2x2 blindfolded.
• Puzzles with even higher dimensions up to 7D
• Puzzles in other topological spaces, including the hyperbolic space, projective plane, and Klein bottle, using MagicTile.
• The Complex 3x3x3, a very neat generalization of the Rubik's Cube.

I gave lectures on how to use group theory to construct algorithms to solve the puzzles listed above in UC Berkeley. Here is a recorded video.

I am an average speed cuber. My personal best is super-20.

I'm also very interested in the game Tchisla and have built a webpage to help me explore the records.

In September 2018, I worked with Roice Nelson to explore possibilities of non-associative "twisty" puzzles. We built a proof-of-concept puzzle based on integral octonions in Python. Check the introduction and the repo.

Deprecated Apps

The puzzles and visualization below were built many years ago using Java Applet. Unfortunately, it's not supported by modern browsers. As of Sept 2019, I am able to start them using IE and setting http://nan.ma as a trusted website in the Java config. I don't have a plan to migrate them to new technology.

Twisty Star: a puzzle based on the beautiful compound of five tetrahedra. It is related to the face-turning icosahedra.

Magic 11-cell: a puzzle based on the abstract regular polytope 11-cell.

Inside H3: not really a puzzle. It's a visualization tool to simulate what you will see when navigating a spaceship in hyperbolic polytopes.