Rubik's Cube is 30 this year. Ever solve it? What's your best time?

The Game Room
21

Me too!

I actually have memorized how to do the pattern to do that (a couple hundred turns, by my guess, but there’s probably a faster way). A few more steps and you can make what I called “The never-ending road” pattern.

I was about a freshman in high school (???) when they started getting popular and I was goofing with it at my friend’s one night and was able to correctly solve one of the sides. So I made the bold proclamation I could solve it in one night if I had the chance and everyone in the room jumped to bet me I couldn’t. I took all the bets and went home to win my bet.

By about 4am I was in a cold sweat and hadn’t gotten any further than that one side. Getting desperate, I popped out one of the side pieces and realized I could “solve it” by taking them all out and putting them back together where they belonged. It worked swimmingly until the last piece… when forcing it in caused one of the spokes that holds the center tile in place – and therefore all the “floating” pieces around it – to break off.

That sent me from a cold sweat into complete terror and the best idea I could come up with was to glue the spoke back together with some Crazy Glue (which works making your fingers stick together but not much else, despite the way cool commercial).

That seemed to work and I spent the next hour reading the Bible for my pennance – er, my way of repaying God for keeping me from getting caught. (Messed up kid, that Adolescent Moonchild.) It all worked pretty well and my friends were amazed when I showed them the solved cube in the morning. Then later that afternoon somebody was playing with it and it literally crumbled in their hands. I feigned ignorance, said something like I did throw it against a wall, but it didn’t seem to damage it, and they never accused me of anything. But they knew I cheated and I knew they knew it and they probably knew I knew they knew. But it never came up again.

And they never paid me the three dollars from the bet. :smack:

Later on I bought the book and learned how to solve it – even taught some others how to (almost) do it, too – and got my time down to 1:15 or so and came up with the aforementioned patterns. But there were two kids in my school who had learned it on their own and I never felt a sense of accomplishment that I had used a guide to learn it. But I never would have figured it out, not in that one night or ever.

22

Do share! Is this something like having stripes of each colour going round the cube and ending back at the start?

23

Back in junior high (almost 30 years ago) I could do it in about 2 minutes or so - I learned from a book, I think.

My niece got one recently for her birthday and I was playing around with it – I could get two layers pretty reliably but ran out of time before figuring out how to arrange the last pieces (after about 30 minutes of playing with it).

24

That sounds like Simple Solution to Rubik’s Cube. Great book, that. I still use that approach. It isn’t designed for speed, though – I still need about 2:20 to 2:30 for solving a cube.

25

I suspect that was the book I had, too. I was in high school when the Cube was originally popular. I learned the solution from that book, and was consistently in the 1:45 time frame to solve my personal Cube (which I’d disassembled and lubed). I was probably more around 2:00 on a “foreign” Cube. :smiley:

I don’t remember the solution any more (it’s been well over 25 years since I did it regularly), though I probably still have the book sitting around somewhere.

26

I posted this somewhere on this board once before in response to something I can’t remember, but anyway, the CubeStormer, built out of LEGO, can solve any 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube in 12 seconds or less. Which is a little bit faster than my best time (about 30 years and counting, granted I never actually tried very hard).

27

I didn’t learn to solve it until way, way after it was cool, sometime in the 1990s. I found an old “how to solve the cube” book that I’d never bothered to read in my closet, and I sat down and learned the patterns. I still remember them, but I was never a speed solver; I probably take around 4 minutes or so.

28

I finally got around to learning how to do one a little less than a year ago after fiddling with one that was in the lab while discussing research. I had known people who knew a method for it, and I’d previously solved them with what were essentially random moves, so I just went right for learning a method. I’ve since, on my own, developed some short cuts and such based on a hodge-podge of a couple different methods and my best time is probably somewhere around 30-40s, but that’ll depend on a fair bit of luck on how things align. I think if I had a well lubricated cube, with the same amount of luck, I could probably solve it around 25s or so. A typical solve where I’m actually aiming going for decent speed is probably more like 90-120s.

However, I’m a fidgetter, so I have one at my desk at work and I’ll solve it casually while thinking or having various discussions; it tends to take quite a bit longer in those circumstances.

29

I never learned how to solve the thing until I was 20. I got one in Ireland back in the early 90s when I was a student. I took it on my trip across Europe and it helped on those long train rides. I ended up solving it on my 20th birthday that year. I never needed to cheat or anything, though after I learned to solve it I did find the used books and learned some more tricks.

I think my best times were in the 2-3 minute range, now it would probably take me 15. I should go pick one up and play with it.

30

Interesting. My method is to do the corners first, then solve the edges. I’ve never tried a 4x4x4 or 5x5x5, but I do think my method would generalize to those pretty well.

I have some moves for patterns typed up (yes, typed, as in typewriter) on a strip of paper still folded up in my Cube packaging.

Here’s the Worm:
R U F[sup]2[/sup] D’ R[SUB]s[/SUB] F[SUB]s[/SUB] D’ F’ R’ F[sup]2[/sup] R U[sup]2[/sup] F R[sup]2[/sup] F’ R’ U’ F’ U[sup]2[/sup] F R

You’ll need to decipher the code. Up, Down, Front, Back, Right, Left obviously, [sup]2[/sup] means a 180 degree turn, ’ means turn the other way, and I suspect the [sub]s[/sub] means turn the middle Slice, but I’m not sure. I’ve also got one called Snake, but I’m not sure of the difference. It’s got more moves, so maybe I’ll post it later.

Here’s the checkerboard Aspidistra was (probaby) talking about:

  • U[sub]s[/sub] B U[sub]s[/sub][sup]2[/sup] F[sub]a[/sub]’ U[sub]s[/sub][sup]2[/sup] F U[sub]s[/sub][sup]2[/sup] R’ U[sub]s[/sub][sup]2[/sup] R[sub]a[/sub] U[sub]s[/sub][sup]2[/sup] L’ U[sub]s[/sub]

Here, the [sub]a[/sub] means… dunno. It might stand for Anti, and maybe for R[sub]a[/sub] you turn the middle and left slices. It might stand for Also, and you turn R and the middle slice. It might stand for All, and you rotate the entire cube. For the rest of the moves, the faces are always pointed the same direction. The asterisk was added by hand later, I think it just means this is a second version of checkerboard (the first being the easy one). I’ve also got a couple of “6 U” patterns, where each side is a U of one color, with another color inside.

I forgot to mention in the OP, but at some point I added little pieces of tape to the face cubes, so I could tell their orientation, then solved that, too. It tutrns out you can rotate a single face square by 180 degrees, or two by +/-90 degrees.

31

Didn’t actually solve it myself, I used one the many solution books that were available (it did one layer at a time: bottom, middle, then top). I got to be pretty quick, my best time being about 30s. But that was a real outlier, at my best my average was around 45 to 50s. It was good enough for me to be state champion back in '81.

I do occasionally dig it out again, it now takes around 60 to 70s. Maybe I need to practice a bit more.

32

Oh, I forgot to mention the other thing I did with the Rubik’s Cube way back when: I made a virtual cube for a college programming class project. I doubt it’ll run natively on any computers any more, but it should still work in dosbox.

33

One of my friends is so good at solving cubes that I made her one with the sides being different textures instead of colors. This way, she can actually solve it with her eyes closed.

I have Square One, and can make it a cube but can’t get the colors right.

I have a pyramid and can solve it easily and quickly.

34

I bought the stickers for $.99. I was also great at breaking them.
Wasn’t it cool to hit your brick school with one and watch the little cubes burst all over the place?

35

Back in the '80s, I could solve it in less than 90 secs, no problem.

The 4x4 Rubik’s Revenge is still sitting on one of my bookshelves, with 2 sides complete and 3 other sides at 9/16. I’ve been working on that for more than 25 years now.

36

The only way I was ever able to solve a Rubik’s Cube was by using a butter knife to pry apart the blocks and put them back together again. (Best time = under 2 minutes.) Doing it the “normal” way, the best I could ever do was one face. I tried using a strategy guide but just couldn’t figure out how to do the rest.

37

The instant I finally resolved this fucking cube, Cenobites started to appear in my room, thank you very much.

38

Tip, by the way: Don’t try this method on the 4x4 or 5x5. They’re much more fragile (especially the 4x4), and trying to pry the pieces apart will just result in the pieces themselves breaking. On the bright side, I did get the chance to get a good look at the inner mechanism of the 4x4, which is completely different from the mechanism for an odd-order one.

39

While we’re at it, I just realized a significant inefficiency in my method. There’s a certain position that I end up in about half the time, when I’m almost done solving, and so I’ve memorized a sequence of moves that gets from that position to the solution. But I just realized that, even though I have it stored as four moves in my brain, a couple of those “moves” are actually compound operations, and that the actual procedure I use there is 18 moves long. Given that any position is solvable in 20 moves or less, and this is really close to solved, there must be a shorter way.

The position in question is that everything is solved except for two adjacent corner cubelets. The two cubelets are in the right position, but one is rotated clockwise, and the other is rotated counterclockwise. This position can be produced via D- R-F+L+F-R+F+L-F- D+ F+R-B-R+F-R-B+R+ . Does anyone know a shorter solution for this position, or where I might go to find such a solution?

40

Goodness, I fumbled briefly with one, while everyone else is talking about treating theirs with lubricants.

The Rubik’s cube obviously parallels my love life.