overlap

It's been a funny day, but an illuminating one. A colleague of mine was playing with a Rubik's Revenge (see title link) - this is the 4 x 4 x 4 version of the Rubik's Cube that readers of a certain age may be familiar with. Perhaps foolishly, the question was put to me of whether I could solve it... Back in the mists of time, I wasn't the first in my school to solve the cube but I was the first to do so without using a book. And over the course of half an hour of playing with the thing, at the end of a fairly creative but mentally-challenging day where I've hopefully got to the bottom of a particular work difficulty, something occurred to me that I've not really considered before. If you asked me how I fixed the thing, I couldn't rightly tell you; there was a lot of instinctive turning going on, and I broke my own Revenge in 1987 so I can justifiably claim to be a little out of practice. Nevertheless, it gradually came together through a lengthy process of trial and error, with patterns forming along the way, which is an exact mirror of how I'd managed to get to grips with my work problem - so in one sense it seems that the many hours of playing with various Rubik puzzles (but especially the cube) when I was ten or eleven seems a far more apposite predictor of the skills with which I now earn my living than any of the areas of study I went on to pursue. Which amuses me no end. Now I just need to find out where my colleague got his from, as I've been meaning to replace mine for quite some time!