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Rubik's
Cube
By Michael Alan Hamlin
October 8, 2002
One of the attractions of the Philippines
to technology investors is its plentiful supply of excellent engineers
and computer programmers. Of course, India and China, each with
about a billion people, produce many more excellent engineers and
programmers than the Philippines. So there's not much competitive
advantage for the Philippines in competing in a beauty contest for
foreign investment on the basis of raw supply of engineers and programmers.
What makes the supply of engineers
and programmers attractive according to Gartner Research is a local
affinity for U.S. culture that competitors like India and China
lack. U.S.-based project managers find it easier to communicate
with project teams that understand implicit cultural nuances in
speech as well as work practices. Then there is what Gartner calls
"world-class" English language proficiency, a highly skilled
workforce, and a strong work ethic and a relentless customer-orientation
mindset.
Indeed, Filipino engineers have a
pretty impressive track record. Filipino engineer turned successful
technopreneur and venture capitalist Dado Banatao designed the first
chip sets for PC clones. Mark Loinaz designed the world's first
single-chip camera. Paco Sandejas, now a venture capitalist like
Banatao, developed a high definition television technology that
fits on a silicon chip less than a square inch in size and half
a millimeter thick.
However, these wonderful inventions
weren't created in the Philippines. They were created in U.S. labs.
Several years ago Sandejas returned to the Philippines to pursue
his dream of fostering a center of excellence so that inventions
like these could be conceived and developed here. It's an uphill
battle, though, because global thirst for the Philippines brightest
minds quickly seduces them away.
So when a Philippine-based engineer
receives some professional acknowledgement for his work, it's worth
spending some time celebrating his success. Take Glen Dizon, for
instance. While Dizon hasn't revolutionized the technology world
with a new super chip, he has managed to do something no one else
has that is both complicated, useful, and elegant.
Dizon is a member of Flashmove, a
short name for The Flash Movement. It's a group of around 6,500
Flash enthusiasts around the world. For the few of you who might
not know, Flash is a technology that animates web pages, html documents,
and even Power Point presentations. It's generally used to provide
movement to otherwise staid copy and graphics, creating an appealing,
almost interactive look and feel to web pages.
This year, Flashmove conducted a
contest to encourage members to think out of the envelope and develop
original, creative ideas for Flash applications. Members from the
U.S., U.K., Canada, Singapore, and other countries participated
in the contest. Dizon appears to be the sole entry from the Philippines,
and to further distinguish himself from the competition he decided
to leverage new three dimensional functionality built into Flash
for his submission.
"I wanted to show how to create
a real-time, interactive, 3D game in Flash MX," Dizon says
of his entry. "The game is Rubik's Cube, a sort of 3-dimensional
puzzle made popular in the '80s. This is a cube with 27 sub-cubes
arranged into a solid block. Each face of Rubik's cube starts out
with a single color and the sub-cubes are then scrambled. The object
of the game is to put it back in its original state where each face
is of a single color.
"I implemented the game using
the Flash MX action script language. Rendering a three-dimensional
cube is simple. Rotating it in space in a cartesian coordinate system
is simple. Rendering the rotated image on a flat screen using only
the X and Y coordinates is also simple. What is not so simple is
the fact that with Rubik's cube, we are dealing with 27 sub-cubes
(if you include the core) that are integrated into a single structure
to make up a bigger cube. Each face of the Rubik's cube may be rotated
on an axis that is perpendicular to its plane. This is also true
of the middle planes (a plane of nine sub-cubes that is not a face).
In addition, there must be a way to display these 27 sub-cubes in
their proper layers even as the whole Rubik's cube is rotated any
which way," Dizon told me last week.
"If you don't do this right,
you'll end up with an incomprehensible mess on your screen. The
Rubik's cube must maintain its integrity no matter what the player
does." To give you an idea of how hard this is, consider a
traditional movie. "It's a lot different from a 3D movie where
everything is predetermined and sequenced during its creation and
there is no varying from the script no matter how many times you
play it," Dizon explained. In contrast, it is impossible to
pre-determine when and how users will manipulate Dizon's virtual
Rubik's cube.
Dizon was the only contestant to
submit a 3D entry, and other than the background, it contains no
drawings. The entire game was created using action script, a programming
tool built into the latest version of Flash. That, and the ingenuity
of the code, made his entry unique.
Now in his second career as a computer
programmer and digital animator - he started out applying his engineering
skills at his father's boiler business - the 39-year-old Dizon dreams
of returning to school, getting "a physics degree, and waking
up one day enjoying the work that I do." Not surprisingly,
he wants to leverage his skills to get a job overseas to pay for
that education. That would be good for Dizon, but too bad for the
Philippines. And not just because Dizon would be gone.
But because Dizon teaches Flash to
web developers and artists, transferring the skills that web development
consultancies look for in their staff. But for the moment, he's
here, and demonstrating in a truly world-class way that Filipino
engineers and programmers are certainly among the best in the world.
And just as importantly, he's helping produce more.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing
director of consultancy TeamAsia and the author of three books on
Asian economies and companies. His latest book is Marketing Asian
Places, of which he is a co-author (Wiley, 2001). He can be reached
at mahamlin@teamasia.com.).
Copyright © 2002 Michael Alan
Hamlin. All Rights Reserved.
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