Download
Cube Explorer 5.00 needs 128 MB of RAM and runs on all Windows platforms from Windows 98 to Windows 7 (32 bit or 64 bit).
Download Cube Explorer (932 kb)I also have a special version Cube Explorer 5.00s available, which uses more than 2 GB of RAM for the huge optimal solver tables. It is about 15 times faster than the standard optimal solver and optimally solves a random cube in less than two minutes on average on a 3 GHz Pentium 4 machine.
With a 32 bit operating system, only Windows XP Professional supports a virtual address space of more than 2 GB for an application. Even with these versions you have to use the /3GB switch in the Boot.ini file to support more than 2 GB of RAM for an application (see
here for details).
You may download this special version
here.
If you run Windows Vista 64 bit, this version will run without any problems if you have about 4 GB of RAM installed. With an Intel Core i7 920 CPU I solved about 300 cubes optimally within one hour by doing the computations in parallel to keep all 8 cores (4 physical and 4 virtual cores) busy.
If you are interested in an Optimal Cube Solver in the Quarter Turn Metric which runs on the command line under LINUX and WINDOWS, you can download the documented C source code
here. An already compiled version for Windows is available
here. The program also accepts the file format of Cube Explorer, so you can generate your cubes in Cube Explorer and feed them to this program.
Bruce MacKenzie has ported this command line program to run on a MAC (nomen est omen). You can download the program
here.
A working version of the two-phase-algorithm is not too easy to program. For demonstration purposes I wrote a Java package which implements the two-phase-algorithm in its simplest form without any symmetry reductions.
The package org.kociemba.twophase, the sourcecode and the corresponding javadocs are included in the file
twophase.jar . The little Java program
GUI_example.jar (Version 2009.02.16), which is an executable jar file shows an example how to use the package.
The tables in this implementation take only about 5 MB and are generated within seconds. Nevertheless the package routine solved about 26000 random cubes/hour if the maximum maneuver length was set to 21 moves and about 800 random cubes/hour if it was set to 20 moves maximum length.
You may use this package for free but you must include an appropriate credit line.
Last but not least I implemented the Two-Phase-Algorithm into a
Mathematica-package. The code runs very slow, but it is also very short. It might be interesting from a theoretical point of view.
The interactive editor function in the package needs at least Version 6.0 of Mathematica.