6D Duoprism {3,3}^2 v2 solved

[Djair Maynart]

Hello, hypercubing group. 

Yesterday, I solved the {3,3}^2 v2 on Magic Puzzle Ultimate, which is to my knowledge the first 6D puzzle solved from there, at least according to the wiki records page. Because of this, I want to talk about it and give some tips.

First of all, the reason I decided to try to solve it was because of its relatively low number of pieces, despite being a 6D puzzle. It only has 1 R0 piece present in all facets which can be seen as a fixed piece so it doesn't need to be moved (more on that later), 8 R1 pieces and 16 R2 pieces (each type of piece is defined in the software). The method I used was the usual piece by piece, where I solved the R1 pieces intuitively according to the colors of the R0 and used simple algorithms to cycle and rotate the remaining R2 pieces. It took me less than 24 hours to solve it.

The hardest thing about this puzzle is probably understanding its perspective and how to move it. Here's my tip on the best perspective I could find:

When you first load the puzzle, you get access to 4 facets like these:

For some reason, when you save the log file and load it, two more facets appear:

Turn the puzzle around until you get this perspective, where the two large "new" facets are at the center. Then click "Switch Dim" once:

You are going to get this new perspective, which is much better to visualize in my opinion. When you try to move pieces in the perspective you get when the puzzle is loaded, they seem to not work very well. This doesn't happen here anymore. Now you can select three R2 pieces to make a move. These moves also get a lot more intuitive in this perspective.

To get a better perspective (since the red and yellow facets are too large and too close to each other), look the puzzle from above like this:

Use shift+right click to change the perspective while looking from above so that the distances of the center facets change. I did this until it looked like this:

Then click "Switch Dim" twice and you will actually be capable of separating the two facets when you change perspective:

Click "Switch Dim" once more and you will get this perspective, which is the best one I could get. You can see each one of the 8 facets of the puzzle, so every piece and sticker is visible. The movements are probably going to make more sense than they do in the standard perspective and I hope the puzzle itself will look more approachable with these tips.

One last tip is about how this puzzle moves. When you select three R2 pieces, it moves R2 and R1 pieces, but also turns the R0 centers, as if it was a deep cut. This way, the color in the center of each facet can actually change with each turn you make. If you want these R0 pieces to stay in place, you could click the number 2 in the lower bar so that each turn actually moves the opposite layer instead of moving the actual layer along with the R0 center. It might be confusing at first to make a turn and move pieces on the opposite side of the puzzle but I still think this is better than having R0 pieces moving around.

The solution of the puzzle itself wasn't that hard. I could solve the R1 pieces in minutes while the R2 pieces took more time. It's actually possible to get only a single R2 piece unsolved, with all of its stickers oriented incorrectly or with only half of its stickers oriented incorrectly, leaving the puzzle with only 3 unsolved stickers. I encourage you to give it a try and see if you can solve this case if it happens to you.

This is actually the first duoprism I've solved, as I've never solved any of the MC4D ones yet. The other 6D prisms are a lot harder and have many more pieces, so I'm not quite ready for them yet. Hopefully some of these tips can be applied to them and other people could finally solve the remaining ones, since I'm not going to try them soon.

I recently solved the 24-Cell FT, which is another puzzle from Magic Puzzle Ultimate. According to the hall of fame on the wiki, nobody has solved it since 2011. It's an interesting puzzle with a few number of solvers I recommend. I didn't make a post about it because there isn't much I could talk about and people have already given some tips. It can be solved with a similar piece by piece method and it took me 5 days.

I hope this post was useful and it helps more people to approach this and other 6D prisms.

Best regards,

Djair