Readit NewsNo it can’t, not in 3D... it is just a turn.
You can however choose to rotate about the first segment until the turn is Right, then use this orientation for the rest.
In terms of normal form and restarts, who cares? Just generate the string both ways, it’s 2n computations, choose the lowest in lexicographic order, and life is good. If you get to billions of turns are humans really going to be doing the comparison? Surely we’d just stream the string into a hash function or something...
You can just define the first turn to be Right no matter how it is oriented.
If you are not happy with that then just rotate the first segment until it looks Right to you. Then label the other turns.
If you are still not happy with the word Right to denote the first term then just make up new notation. Define the first turn to be 1. Use numbers to denote turns if you object to using Left and Right.
I am in half the mind to forward this article to some of my colleagues in the academia but without seeing the backing data and research the article will be met with some skepticism.
The shapes generally progress in difficulty until they are deemed “impossible” for any human shape rotator to figure out.
If you reduce the problem to counting instead of shape rotation (3D matrix multiplication) many humans can “shape rotate” to impossibly high levels of IQ