The Jewel Page

The Jewel, marketed by C. Bandelow under the name of the "Christoph's magic jewel", is puzzle in the shape of a truncated octahedron (an octahedron with the vertices chopped off), similar to the Rubik's cube. One turns the faces of the truncated octahedron, which corresponds to turning the vertices of the implicit octahedron. We shall simply refer to this puzzle as the jewel or as a Rubik truncated octahedron. (The pictures found on this page will be drawn using the full octahedron since it has fewer faces and this makes the program to draw them easier to write. However, the program was inspired by Christoph's jewel.)

A puzzle which is equivalent to the jewel can be constructed from a Rubik's cube by removing the stickers and applying a suitable new set of stickers. The solution to this puzzle is, in principle, no harder than solving the Rubik "super cube".

The basic jewel moves: The basic moves are twists by 90 degrees clockwise about each of the six corners R,U,F,D,L,B. For example, here's a picture of the move F . The inverse of a move m will be denoted m^(-1) and the composition of two moves m1, m2 will be denoted m1*m2 (move m1 first, then m2).

The MAPLEV4 jewel package has routines to simulate the movements of the jewel on the computer. If you have MAPLEV4 on the `d` drive and Windows 3.1 or better then here is how to load the skewb package:

• create a subdirectory "games" of your maplev4/share directory,
• create a subdirectory "jewel" of your maplev4/share/games directory,
• copy jewel.mpl into this "jewel" subdirectory,
• read this text file into maple and save the resulting .m file in the "games" subdirectory created above,
• in a new session of maple type:

  read(`d:/maplev4/share/games/jewel/jewel.mpl`);
  with(plots):
  help_skewb();
  

• To make the move F, for example, type

  ro(F,A0);
  

  To make the move F*R^(-1), for example, type

  ro([F,R,R,R],A0);
  

Last modified 4-13-97