Talk:Snake cube

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A regular sized snake cube (like those in the pictures) is 91⅛ m3 in size.

An edge length of 90 mm would sound a lot more credible.
—Herbee (talk) 23:56, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

• You can't make a checkerboard using 27 cubes because the square root of 27 isn't a natural number. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Meeuw (talk • contribs) 11:19, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Solution section

The 27-cube snake cube puzzle (Cubra Bafflin' Blue) laid flat (top) and packed into a 3×3 cube (bottom) – cubelets with straight holes are outlined 

I have removed the Solution section. Instructions for solving puzzles are not encyclopedic, are often original research, and do not belong at Wikipedia - see WP:NOTHOWTO. Gandalf61 (talk) 12:40, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

@Gandalf61: @Cmglee: It's back, and probably bound to reoccur at intervals. I possess two different 4x4x4 snakecubes, both of which I have solved by bactracking, and feel a certain urge to include it ... (Both have eight distinct solutions, half of which are mirror images of the other four. For one cube, all solutions are quite trivial variations of each others; for the other, there appear to be three significantly different solutions.) But I agree, solutions do not belong here; the two photos suffice.--Nø (talk) 10:03, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

@Nø: Thanks for your feedback. The previous comment was from 10 years ago; it seems the content on Wikipedia has moved on since, e.g. on Soma_cube#Solutions. Nevertheless, to address your concerns, I've omitted calling it a solution, and referenced a paper which gives the 3×3 packing. Cheers, cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 13:14, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

@Cmglee: The policy [user:Gandalf61] referenced may have changed during those 10 years; I do not know. But it is still pretty clear from that policy (WP:NOTHOWTO) that solutions, whatever they are called, should not appear here, and certainly not in the absence of reliable sources. Things that are clearly true or easily verifiable still need a source, not just (I think) to substantiate the claim, but also to demonstrate its notability. I haven't checked the Soma solutions (though I am a compatriot of the inventor and the happy owner of a home-carpentered Soma cube), but there is probably a better chance of finding usable sources there - and if not, they should be removed too. -- I do think that the photo of the extended (non-folded) snake could be replaced by the top part of your figure as it shows the lay-out more clearly (though it would, for this purpose, be neater without the numbers).--Nø (talk) 13:35, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

PS. If you do choose to re-draw, applying a green shade to the even-numbered cubelets would make it a nicer companion to the photo of the solved cube.--Nø (talk) 13:38, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi, @Nø: I've added a reference and coloured the cubelets similar to the existing photos. The numbering helps the reader match up the cubelets in the laid-out and packed configurations. Hope that works now. Cheers, cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 22:05, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

References