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
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.
I built a website to visualize the regular star polytopes in 2D, 3D, and 4D, plus hyperbolic star tilings. Check it out here. Below are some examples of the visualization.
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Regular Star Polytopes: visualization of regular star polytopes in 2D, 3D, 4D, and hyperbolic plane. |
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Lights Out 3D: a puzzle similar to Lights Out in spirit but based on polyhedra. Touch friendly! |
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Lollipop: a 2D puzzle that contains all possible pieces twisted by all subsets of axes. |
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RefleCube: a Magic Cube allowing only reflection moves rather than twisting moves, or both. |
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Clockwork Cube: a Magic Cube on which the rotation of all the slices are correlated. |
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.
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Twisty Star: a puzzle based on the beautiful compound of five tetrahedra. It is related to the face-turning icosahedra. |
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Magic 11-cell: a puzzle based on the abstract regular polytope 11-cell. |
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Inside H3: not really a puzzle. It's a visualization tool to simulate what you will see when navigating a spaceship in hyperbolic polytopes. |