CubeCheater

CubeCheater

Loyal readers have probably noticed that I haven't been posting very often in the last couple of months. During the spare seconds between my job and two classes at UW, I've been working on a new iPhone app.

I'm pleased to (finally) announce that the application is complete and should be available on the iTunes App Store soon. I just uploaded it and am now waiting for Apple's approval before it goes live.

The app is called CubeCheater and is an iPhone/iPod Touch app for solving everybody's favorite 80's puzzle cube. You input the state of your cube, and it will compute an optimal (or near-optimal) solution to solve it.

It uses the Group Theory algorithm discovered by Herbert Kociemba to do the solving. I haven't tried all 519 quintillion cube configurations, but I have run through quite a few random ones during my testing and I've never seen the program give a solution worse than 22 moves (the current upper bound [2] on optimal cube solutions as of August 2008). On average it takes about 7 seconds to find a good solution.

The other particularly cool part of the app is that it takes advantage of the iPhone's camera and can recognize your cube from pictures you take of it, using computer vision. I was pleased with how well this turned out - if you orient the cube properly with good lighting, it recognizes the cube perfectly every time.

That feature and most of the cool animations and 3D effects are best experienced by watching the app in action, so if you're interested, head on over to the website and check out the embedded YouTube video (or view it directly on YouTube, and don't forget to click "watch in high quality").

Here are some screenshots:

CubeCheater Title Screen CubeCheater Input Screen CubeCheater Computer Vision CubeCheater User Error

CubeCheater Searching for a Solution  CubeCheater Solution Preview CubeCheater Solving the Cube CubeCheater Solution Options

Posted on December 15, 2008
Comments (6) Trackbacks (0)
  1. Nice! The app design is brilliant, love the graphics! Did you use OpenGL ES for the solution part?

  2. That is spectacular and so very impressive! Way to go, Eric…

    I especially like the solving screen, due to the black bird…:)

  3. Thanks everyone! Yep OpenGL is used for the 3D solution part.

    I added the raven in at the last minute, so I’m glad that you like it :). He’s supposed to be Hugin, the raven who represents “thought” from Norse mythology. So he’s thinking about how to solve the cube. Maybe it’s a little cryptic..

  4. that is so useless and so cool at the same time. nice work buddy!

  5. I love it. How did you do the image recognition?

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