Well an algorithm in this case is just a memorized series of moves. You are correct that the puzzle can be solved by sheer memorization. It is simply - use this series of moves to get it to be like this. Then use this series of moves if X or do this if Y. I wouldn’t say that you can do it with “no understanding” of the puzzle - as knowing the moves is knowing the puzzle (I get what you mean though) - but you could use the link I gave you (and I have) to solve any cube. It would probably take someone with reasonable intelligence and reading comprehension 20-40 minutes to read through and solve a cube in front of them for first time. It requires knowing eight sets of moves. I think I was doing it in like 6 minutes or so after my first few times.
So no one you see solving a cube on YouTube is “solving” the cube as in - how do I get this side to be green. They are using a set of pre defined (and usually universally known) moves to solve the cube.
It wasn’t necessarily 20 moves or less as shown in that infographic, which may well be saying that no matter what the starting point it can be solved in 20 moves or less but not necessarily the same 20 moves.
I seem to remember it being more than 20 moves but not hundreds. I still remember my friends name… I may just try to find him on facebook and ask him to remind me exactly what it was he showed me almost 30 years ago.
But the bottom line is that without any understanding of the cube and as far as I can remember, zero or very minimal awareness of how the colors were arranged at any given point, following the same sequences would eventually solve the cube.
How does the guy in video do it blindfolded after a cursory examination of the starting position?
Ah well then this must have been the case, and basically what I described in my first post minus a relatively small detail. Maybe it required a little bit of attention to what the positions were - e.g. IF this pattern, THEN this movement… but fundamentally this still meant the cube could be solved by simply following a memorized set of moves.
I was reminded of this by the OP - while our friends were taking their cubes apart or peeling the stickers off in frustration, we were able to confound and annoy them by solving the cube quickly and easily. At first he was the only one who could do this and he confided in me this ‘trick’ which worked for me too.
Any starting position can be solved in 20 moves or fewer - that has been mathematically proven (or so I understand), but that’s not the same set of 20 moves for every starting point. It can’t be.
Cannot possibly be true. It doesn’t matter if it’s 20 fixed moves or 1000 fixed moves - that will only cycle you through at most 20 (or 1000) combinations of the cube, leaving 43,252,003,274,489,855,880 (or 43,252,003,274,489,855,000) combinations unaddressed.
He’s memorising the starting configuration (as in photographic memory) and solving it using groups of formulaic moves that are each partial solutions for patterns he’s observed on the cube - or something like that.
There can’t be a small, fixed set of moves that solves every starting position. It’s impossible.
I took the stickers off. A guy at work got one, let me borrow it, he didn’t believe me when I told him what I’d done. Then with some guys at work we figured out how to disassemble them just to prove our theory of how it worked mechanically. Then we drove one guy crazy by moving stickers so the same color was on two faces of a corner.
Is how you do it blindfolded. Basically the same way you do it not blindfolded, but with algos and memorizations setup to make it easier to be idiot proof when you can’t see.
You have to study the cube and figure out what set of moves to apply - then do it.
There are tons of internet resources on how to solve the cube. None of it is rocket science - and there isn’t anything being done that anyone else can’t do (it’s just hard to do fast). It is a very well understood and document process.
The more algos you memorize - the less moves you need to make. The people that are super competitive will remember sometimes over 100 different algos, but this is the very fringe. You can do it reasonably well in as few as 8 (maybe fewer - but not one).
It is the law of diminishing returns - each extra algorithm or edge case you memorize is only going to shave a little bit off your time.
Also keep in mind that if you are memorizing moves - you aren’t really memorizing 35 moves or something - you are memorizing usually eight or more patterns. Once you know the patterns of moves (algo) - and do it enough - it is more like muscle memory. You aren’t thinking move this corner twice - you are thinking “ok do the cross” or “position the edges” or whatever.
However I must have read something wrong on that one - as it wasn’t until I read the guide I posted earlier that I solved the cube. I think the prettier one had something I found confusing in one of the steps - although don’t remember 100% now.
Look at it another way - suppose you have a sequence of five fixed moves (it doesn’t matter what they are, if they are the same every time) named A, B, C, D, E…
You can only solve five different starting positions with this sequence - that is, the cubes that are:
solved minus EDCBA
solved minus DCBA
solved minus CBA
solved minus BA
solved minus A
A fixed sequence of moves cannot solve more starting positions than the number of those fixed moves.
Yes, with DataX’s explanation of how the cube is properly solved I now realize that all my friend showed me was how to properly solve the cube. It seemed like a ‘trick’ at the time because I could solve it by simply repeating memorized series of moves. The only thing I apparently failed to remember is that I needed to pay some attention to the arrangement of colors as I walked through those memorized steps to determine which series of memorized steps to apply.
The point is that anyone who can memorize a set of rules can solve the cube without need to take the stickers off. That isn’t really the same thing as having to mentally wrestle with 43,252,003,274,489,855,880 (or 43,252,003,274,489,855,000) combinations of anything.
Or to put it another way, left to my own devices and cognitive ability, I would have wrestled with those combinations forever or taken the cube apart.
But with something a ten year old kid could teach me to memorize, I was able to consistently solve the cube with no new understanding of geometry, 3D space, or puzzle solving ability. To me, that was cheating and the real way to solve the puzzle was to twist and turn and predict and analyze until you manually got all the colors aligned.
Disassembling the cube and re-assembling it is my standard method of returning the cube to its original state.
At a job I worked at several years ago, there was a Rubik’s Cube that they kept out on a table, which several people played with, and one was always solving. When I left, I re-assembled the cube with one of the corner cubes rotated by 120 degrees from the “correct” configuration. No amount of simply manipulating the cube would ever restore it to the “each side one color” state – you’d have to disassemble the cube and re-assemble it with that twist taken out. Then I scrambled the cube so it simply looked like a played-with Rubik’s Cube. This made it impossible to solve.
I just had to jump in here and say that I actually play-tested the cube back in 1980. My next door neighbor worked at Ideal games in Queens, NY, and my brother and I got to play test several of their offerings(The “Jaws” game was another that I remember). The first time I solved it in about 8 hrs. The next day I mixed it up and could not solve it all day, so I re-arranged the stickers. I may have been one of the first in America to solve it the right way, and to cheat. I also play tested the book, and when I was a teenager I could solve it in about 2 minutes. The way I remember it, you solved one side, getting all of the blocks in the correct location (You would have one side, and one complete row on each of the 4 adjacent sides. Then there was an algorithm to get each of the other 4 corners correct. Then there was a series of moves that you would do forever until the rest of the cube was right. I may be wrong however, since I haven’t touched a cube in 20 yrs.
I think I disassembled it because I was baffled as to how it could work, not (necessary) to cheat. It seemed impossible to me how it could turn on two right-angled axes and still stay together.
Anyone else disappointed by the Rubik’s cube gif on the Google page? What’s with all the white squares, including two completely white sides? That’s no Rubik’s cube!
On topic, I didn’t try to take it apart before solving it. I first heard about it in Scot Morris’s Games column in Omni Magazine. His “puzzle” the month he first wrote about it was asking readers to explain how it could mechanically work. The next month, he showed how it was actually put together.
I was looking for it to show up in stores, and as soon as it was in the local ad, I bought it, and took it to school with me the next day. Not as early as tonyfop by a long shot, but first in my school at least.
Yes, that’s one of the three parity factors. You also can’t have just a single edge flipped, or interchange only two cubelets in an otherwise solved cube.
If you mark the centers so you can see their orientation, you also can’t give a single center square a 1/4 turn rotation in an otherwise solved cube. You can give a single center square a half-turn, though.
