Why can't I tell the true shape of Lu-shan?
Because I myself am in the mountain.
-- Su Shi

for scramble 8

As usual, change the depth to 8 at my repo.

trial 1

From O3,

and from O1,

Look at this monster!!! Where to start? I am not gonna lie, I give up reversing the scramble steps now. I will treat this as a practice to complete some basic milestone...

I would like to proceed in this way: finishing the edges first, and then center octahedron, and then finally the other centers, if we can go that far at all. I will start from the X+'s red, because red is originally at X+. Also, reset W- (with most yellow stickers) to Y+ so that we can compare red and yellow cell state to the solved state,

By the end, I do a Z rotation, because this way, we set two pieces in their original positions. They are red-yellow-null-coffee (X+O0-O7 edge and Y+O0-O7, coffee is at W+) and red-yellow-green-null (X+O6-O7, Y+O4-O7, Z-O0-O7 edge). Recall that we used this X-Y-Z-W sticker notation a lot back in Part II, but now, the edge pieces has three visible cells only, so null can indicate the axis that means nothing to the piece.

The missing 2 edges in the red-yellow face are near as well. The red-null-yellow-blue is at X+O5-O6, which should go to X+O0-O1, and the red-yellow-null-pink is at X+O3-O4, which should go to X+O1-O6. We can tell without any complex analysis that once any of the two is finished first, the other one cannot go to the last empty slot in red-yellow face unless performing some break-and-glue steps.

Thus, instead of finishing any of them first, we can set red-yellow-null-pink to X+O0-O1 first, then red-null-yellow-blue to X+01-O2, and then a O1' twist on X+. Theoretically the described steps are possible, but it cannot be done at X+. Let's move them back to W-, and carry out the steps,

After settling red-yellow-null-pink to X+O0-O1, I change the view to O2, and decrease the distance between each stickers. It turns out like 7 dino cubes there. Anyway, the red-yellow face turns out OK, but all other reds are everywhere...

Conclusion

The bad news is, I didn't implement the saving feature, and the webGL status become weird across hibernate session. Maybe we should work this out tomorrow, or otherwise we have to keep challenging new puzzles and never be able to finish one.

I am pessimistic now. It doesn't look like I will be able to figure all this out. Hopefully not.

小結

scramble 亂度為 8 時無從下手，試著解開一面的邊塊。