Generate WCA scrambles for the Rubik's Cube and other twisty puzzles on the command line!
What?
TNoodle is the official scrambling program used by the World Cube Association (the "WCA") in official Rubik's Cube Speedsolving Competitions. This project provides a Command Line Interface (CLI) for the same core scramble generator engine used for generating official scrambles.
Why?
The core TNoodle engine is a Java library, which makes it difficult to incorporate into programs written in other programming languages. However, since most programming languages can invoke system calls, they can invoke this CLI to obtain competition quality scrambles and drawings for all official WCA puzzles and events.
You can get the TNoodle CLI for Windows, Linux, and Mac on the releases page.
Simply download the version corresponding to your operating system and extract the archive contents to a convenient place in your file system.
Open a terminal in the bin folder of the extracted package and you're ready to go.
- Alternatively, if you know what you're doing, you can add that
binfolder to your system PATH to have thetnoodlecommand available system wide.
If there isn't a distribution for your operating system, feel free to open an issue requesting its addition to the release pipeline.
In the meantime, as long as you have Java 11 or higher, you can directly use the core .jar file also available on the releases page.
The tool itself contains detailed documentation for its use.
tnoodle --helpThe core commands are:
puzzles: Lists all the puzzles for which the WCA, and thus this CLI tool, provide scramble generators.scramble: Generates one or more scrambles for a specific puzzle typedraw: Generates an svg image of a particular scramble.
- This design decision makes it easier to maintain this CLI tool as different puzzles and scrambling algorithms are added/removed from the official scrambler.
NOTE: If you are using the core .jar file, swap out the tnoodle command for java -jar tnoodle-cli-VERSION.jar in this and the following examples.
> tnoodle scramble
D L' U L U2 L' U2 B U' R' F2 R L' D2 L D2 F2 L
> tnoodle scramble --puzzle four
L' F B2 L F2 B2 L' F2 L2 R B2 U' B' D' L2 D' F2 B2 R2 Fw2 U Rw2 Uw2 R' U' Rw2 R D2 B2 Rw2 Fw2 L Fw' F B2 Uw' D L Uw2 Rw' D Rw' U'
> tnoodle scramble --puzzle skewb --count 5 --output "skewb.json"
> cat skewb.json
[
"L B L B' L' U R B L' B L",
"L U R B U B R' B L B R",
"B U L' U' L R' B R' B U L'",
"B L U B' U' B' L B' L U' R'",
"B R U' B' U L U' L' B' U' L"
]
> tnoodle draw --puzzle three --scramble "D L' U L U2 L' U2 B U' R' F2 R L' D2 L D2 F2 L" --output three.svg
TNoodle CLI uses Gradle, so building from source is just the standard gradle build command.
./gradlew build
The built .jar file will be located at ./build/releases/tnoodle-cli-VERSION.jar
If you want to build the full distributions for each operating system, then use the runtimeZip task.
./gradlew runtimeZip
The built distributions will be in ./build/releases/
Disclaimer: This CLI tool is an unofficial project currently unaffiliated with the WCA. Scrambles generated by this tool are NOT authorized for use in any official WCA event. All such scrambles must be generated using the official TNoodle program.
This tool is licensed under the GPLv3 because its primary dependency, the official WCA tnoodle-lib, is licensed under the GPLv3. This means that you have full freedom to use, modify, and redistribute this tool, provided that you do so under these same license terms. See the LICENSE.md for the full legal details.
Note, however, that this CLI tool can be aggregated into a larger collection of programs without the whole collection being deemed a "derivative work" that must be redistributed under the terms of the GPLv3. See these Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) --the author of the GPLv3 license-- for more details: