Once you start playing with 4D puzzles, it’s difficult to stop. They are highly addicting.
After thinking about the 2x2x2x2 puzzle for a while, I started wondering how many ways there were to build a kind of 4D Soma puzzle. That is, little pieces all fitting together perfectly to create the 2x2x2x2 hypercube.
There are endless variations on such a puzzle, so I narrowed it down a bit. Consider that there are a total of 16 little hypercubes in a 2x2x2x2 hypercube. Suppose we only consider puzzles where each “piece” consists of exactly 4 little hypercubes.
It will take four such pieces to build the 2x2x2x2 hypercube (since 4×4 = 16). Suppose we restrict things even further: All four of those pieces need to be the same shape.
How many different 4D puzzles can we make, if we follow those rules? More tomorrow.