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Rubik's Cube Comeback
aheath writes "Today's Boston Globe has an interesting article on the revived popularity of the Rubik's Cube. The article mentions that Winning Moves Games 'hopes to capitalize on the renaissance of the original Rubik's Cube in the next several months by rereleasing a version of the supersize 'Rubik's Revenge,' a 4-by-4 cube with 16 squares per side.' You can compare your best Rubik's Cube solution speed to the world champion's record. If the manual solution method doesn't appeal to you, you can always use the Lego Robotics automated method." I remember having a cube that had letters on each sticker instead of colors, so that the solved product spelled words across each face. That thing got me through a lot of childhood car rides.
I could never figure out how the darned things worked. I took a few apart, but it still seems like magic to me.
I tried and tried to solve that maddening little cube... ended up taking it apart.
OK, I cheated. I'm a bad person. Happy now?
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I wrote a program in Qbasic to solve it. Is that cheating?
I used to do the cube in under a minute regularly. My best averages were around 50 seconds. Nowhere close to the world champion of course, but still more than enough to impress your friends
I used the corners first algorithm. Its not what the fastest cubers use, but its much easier to learn, because its more "natural". It also has a shorter average number of moves (under 60, IIRC). Though I say "easier", it takes several months!
For less than 15, I mean.
Here are a couple of links if you want to get better at solving it:
Lars Petrus' method for speed
Dan Knight, the world champion
Jessica Fridrich. Her method is used by many.
www.speedcubing.com
www.rubiks.dk
A solution some think is easy.
I bought my first cube 2 months ago and today I completed it in 56.98 seconds! After loads of practice of course.
Was the Dick Monalds cube that had...
Big Mac, Fillet O' Fish, Quarter Pounder, French Fries, Thick Shakes, and Apple Pies on the sides. I still have it in storage somewhere.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I mastered the 4x4x4 revenge long ago. I'm moving on to the 5x5x5 Professor.
i remember in Mandrake-7.2 there was a exellent Rubics cube toy that worked perfict...
Methods that start with solving the cube layer by layer are require a lot of formulea that you simply have to learn by heart (or read from the book) and thus are very hard to remember especially over the long run.
The formulea that is used to move the corner cubes to the right location also lays at the basis of the moves needed to solve the 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 cubes. I have never solved those, but I have others seen doing it.
Rubik, the Hungarian mathematician, invented his cubic toy as a playful model of quaternion math in group theory. Has playing with the Cube influenced a generation of people who could actually learn quaternion dynamics from it as children? Can the puzzle be used to demonstrate to the unenlightened the quantum computing techniques those grownups are now inventing?
--
make install -not war
I wasted so many hours of my finite life working on that damn cube and I'll never get any of that time back. I hate it!
The owls are not what they seem
What happened since then??? :)
The linux hacker
* The inventor Rubik used to solve it in about 3 minutes
* To measure your average the standard procedure is to do it 12 times, remove the smallest and largest, and take the mean of the remaining 10
* The fastest cubers have averages of about 17 secs
* The best average anyone ever got is (IIRC) 12 secs (Imagine that!!)
* Some people can solve the entire cube blindfolded!! (Study it once, get blindfolded and then solve it). Its based on group theoretic invariants of the cube. You can do certain operations without changing most of the cubies
* Some people can solve a 20x20x20 cube (a software simulation of course)
* There are some incredible videos of people speed solving it available. One by Dan Knights for instance
* The best known computer algorithm can solve random instances in 18 moves (human solutions take about 60 moves). This is optimal on average; There is a lot of work going into finding "God's algorithm", a worst case move-optimal solution
Disclaimer: I used to do it 2 or 3 yrs ago so my info might be somewhat outdated.
I still can't solve one, or even two sides. I can get one, then continue with another until I've got about 7 or 9 squares of the second, but I just can't seem to finish it. Or, if I take a different apporach, I can finish one side, and then a little more than half of all other sides. of course, I always quit after a few minutes. Tv and the internet (mostly slashdot) have shortened my attention span; I wonder what's on right now...
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
Wow that is really impressive, I hafta say. Twenty seconds to solve a fully randomized cube!! Kids these days!
--
om Shanti
Of course I forgot one:
Josef Jelikek's fast method for the last layer.
This is the one I use. It's the same as Lars Petrus' method up to the last layer, but then it does things in a different order and you only have to memorize 28 patterns to solve the last layer in 2 steps.
For beginners I recommend Lars Petrus' page. You only have to learn flipping the edges, Niklas(tm), Sune(tm) and Allan(tm) by heart to always be able to solve it. I.e. only 4 sequences. That's how I started off.
A: None. Capitalism only rewards inventors when they are forced into it by the law. So much for all of this 'we respect IP rights' crap.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
It's not magic, the solution is simple, there's a Rubix inside of a Rubix!
Could somebody who is more enlightened, explain HOW the cube works, or maybe post a link?
I don't understand, how when twisting it, the corners don't flat fall off.
As of 10/06/03, I hate COBOL developers.
for those of us that are now curious but can't afford one!
Java Cube
By a strange coincidence (unless Slashdot is watching me... ), my girlfriend called a little while ago to tell me that we've been invited (really, she's been invited and I get to tag along) to a Rubik's Cube Party. The idea is that everyone wears something that matches each of the cube's colors to the party (6+ pieces of clothing) and leaves wearing just one color.
So, somehow the mind challenger has been turned into a clothes swapping party. Who'd have thought it?
Is the Lars petrus solution.
Apparently its not the fastest by about 0.5 seconds or so but it takes years to get to that level.
I found it encredibly easy to learn, got under 60 seconds in less than a month.
http://lar5.com/cube/
In the time it took to read that submission, Rubik's Cube came and went. Again.
You can't push a fad, you know.
Groovy.
String theory physics has determined that the universe is a really big 11 dimensional Rubik's cube.
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Among corner pieces, all positions are possible (reachable from a given configuration), but only one out of 3 orientations are possible.
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Among edge pieces, only half the positions are possible (diagonally opposite edge pieces can't be switched) and only half the orientations are possible.
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Among center pieces all positions are possible.
So that means only 1/12 of the total configurations are possible!So if you take the cube apart and put it back randomly, chances are you'll end up with an insoluble position :)
This also allows us to count the number of possible configurations.
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Corner positions: 8! (8 factorial)
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Corner orientations: 3^8
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Edge positions: 12!
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Edge orientations: 2^12
Total = 8! 3^8 12! 2^12 / 12 = 43252003274489856000 = 4.3 * 10^19Now a math teaser:
The set of operations (operation = sequence of moves) you can perform on a cube forms a group. Two group elements x, y are said to commute if xy = yx (in this case, 2 operations commute if it doesn't matter in which order you perform them). Question: Find an operation that commutes with every operation.
Rot13d spoiler follows.
Syvccvat nyy gur rqtr cvrprf.
In fact this is the only answer. If you know group theory, this is the only group element other than the identity which lies in the center of the cube group.
I grew so frustrated with mine I threw it away furiously once, damn thing broke a vase!
Then I melted it on the stove. Heh that'll teach the damned Cube!
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Those truly interested in the importance of the Rubik's cube should dig into the archives of Scientific American (if it's not online as a subscriber, try a library). There was a very good, in-depth (cover) story published as the popularity was beginning to wane. For the mathematically inclined, the Cube delves heavily into Group Theory and the article points this out. It also refers to "God's Algorithm", which means if you were to take a cube of any arrangement, hand it to a machine programmed with the algorthim, it would solve the problem with the same twists & turns with no decision making - just the same twists & turns. If you stop to ponder this - a universal algorithm with the same steps applied to any arrangement - this is pretty incredible! IIRC, the number of steps is on the order of 10^60 steps. Back to the mathematics. The arrangement of the tiles is important: at least if any of the pieces are pulled off of the framework and put back on (and this is not the same as peeling the colored paper off). When I was in college, there was a guy named Bert (seriously - his middle name could have been PointDexter) who bragged he could solve a cube in any arrangement in thirty seconds. Someone came to my room and asked if there was any way to shut this guy down. I grabbed a cube, took a corner cube off, gave it a 1/3 twist, and snapped it back into the framework. Scramble the puzzle a bit more, and down we went to visit Bert. Thirty seconds, forty seconds, fifty seconds. At three minutes, Bert exclaimed, "Someone's been tinkering with this cube!" (and he was pretty worked up by now) Obviously, this was pretty funny because his "any cube in thirty seconds" rep was gone and the fact he'd tried harder & harder as time progressed over the goal was gone. By 1982 or 1983, you could go to Target and buy Cubes for $0.50 (closeout). For those with a passing knowledge of the Cube wanting to delve into the history, one of the good places to go is eBay. There was a Saturday morning cartoon (copies sell on eBay), earrings, keychains, 4x4x4 cubes, 5x5x5 cubes, etc. I'm sure there are plenty of web pages and other online resources dedicated to the Cube as well (remember, there was no web when the Cube was hot).
Rubik lived in a communist country, any money he could've made would've gone to the state anyway.
..to solve it included a screwdriver to pry the tiles of. Apperantly, I didn't have much patience back then.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
The 4 x 4 cube and other shapes and sizes has been available for some time from Meffert's Puzzles. I ordered a Pyraminx from them a few years back. I always like it better than the cube.
I'm actually so good at it that people are starting to ask me to jumble a finished cube.
Ass, LINK GOES TO: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userclose which logs you out.
probably one of those 70s revival thingies like those retro-wood stereos that we've been seeing... i'm sure those who do it are driven to it mostly thanks to fashion rather than genuine interest
personally i still prefer playing vexed on my Clie... i've been stuck on one of the levels for weeks if not months now and can't figure it out...
ESR further advanced the "hacker cult" by
decreeing (essentially) that the glider from the
Game of Life henceforth denote
membership in the organization headed by him. (See
previous slashdot story).
Given the increase in Rubik's Cube popularity,
perhaps Mr. Raymond seleted his icon prematurely.
Or perhaps he will appropriate the Cube too, in an
effort to increase his population of followers.
Note to Dogbert and the Brain: you have another
competitor in your plans for world domination!
I remember popping off a corner of the cube, removing all the other corners & pieces, then putting them back together in the right order (IMO, this is a valid solution). Has anyone ever timed this to see how long it would take? I used to be able to do it in about 2 minutes.
what ever happened to square one? am i the only one that bought one of those things?
the lame thing came already messed up with directions on how to solve it. though, i didnt realize that until after i started playing with it.
Never did solve it as a kid, so finally picked up one last year. Took 6 hours straight to solve the 3x3x3. I was kind of hoping for a longer challenge. LOL. The Revenge, and Professor (4x4x4 and 5x5x5) look like to be quite the challenge. Funny enough, the little 2x2x2 was just as tricky.
... does anyone know the total number of permutations for it? I figured it should be = 8! * 3^8, so I have a 3 Gig database of all the cube states, along with a pointer to how to reach it's initial stage. Still writing a 'solver' though.
Speaking of the 2x2x2
But to date if I'm wandering in a store and see scrambled cubes out for display I will usually sit and [try to] solve them :). Kinda like seeing juggling balls on display. It's a moral imperative.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I found an old one my father had from the 80s and decided to learn how to solve it. Then when i got to school this fall, a bunch of kids saw me playing with it and all went out and bought them.
;)
I figure i'm the one responsible for this cube revival
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
You can play with it here
No sig to see here. Move along.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
A group of us in High school got together and solved this thing collectively over e period of several months. When we could all solve it, we would have races.
We would use vaseline in the mechanism to stop them jamming, and to prevent them wearing out.
Otherwise, when racing with a well worn cube, the thing would fly apart in your hands - I'm not kidding!
Our maths teacher hated them, because they used to disrupt his class a bit (and he couldn't solve it himself).
Best racing ones were the originals. The taiwanese knock-offs were nowhere near as well made and would jam up.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Ahhh, the Rubik's Cube. Video games nowadays may entertain for hours and stimulate the mind, the cube did in the early 80's though. I was a freshman in HS in '82 and that and the next year were spent perfecting my solutions for it instead of study :) I averaged under a minute with a best of :24 once. I was so excited, the :24 time was when the standing world record was I think :24. This was just a week or so before the competition that was televised from Budapest where someone did it in :22.
I also scrambled it and worked it the exact same way over and over enough times that I could do it blindfolded or behind my back. It was like 109 total moves to solve and they were standard moves for my method, just memorized. Blew people's minds to see it done...
I don't remember that one, but I do remember having one that had fruits on them -- oranges, bananas, cherries, pineapples, etc. -- in addition to the original Rubik's Cube and the Pyraminx.
My first job, way back when in sixth grade or so, consisted of solving other kids' Rubik's Cubes. It was fairly lucrative. I always wondered why they would bother paying someone to solve it for them, but nonetheless, they did.
Maybe they brought them home after school to show their parents how smart they were, or something. They certainly couldn't do that to other kids, because the other kids knew I solved it for them.
Here's a pretty fun 2x2x2 Homer Simpson rubiks cube :) I bought 2 awhile back (buy one get one free)... gonna give one to my boss. This one is actually harder than you think.
0 00 088UO3/qid=1068331293/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-781290 7-5093419?v=glance&s=toys
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B
"Rubik's wrist" & "Cubist's Thumb" are mentioned in Singmaster's "Notes on Rubik's Magic Cube". I have had some problems like this at times, but nothing that prevented me from cubing. I still get weird twinges in my wrist or the backs of my hands/fingers every once in a while, but I mostly got rid of these with a few changes: 1. Make sure you have a really smooth easy-turning cube! I started off with really stiff cubes, and that's why I got injured. As soon as I lubed my cube regularly, most of the problems went away. 2. Relax while cubing. 3. Don't cube with cold hands. 4. If I feel any small twinges of pain, especially after I finish cubing for the day, then I stop for a few days. 5. Chris Hardwick told me he wraps gauze tightly around his wrist while cubing, and that this lengthens the amount of time that he can cube comfortably.h tml
http://benjerry.middlebury.edu/~knights/CubeInfo.
Somehow i get the impression those tricks & tips are good for more than just cube related injuries. Or is it just me?
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
And to see a video of a speed cuber, look at Dan Knight's page.
Annoted Pratical Guide for Solving Rubik's Cube
1. Take apart a cube
2. rotate one of the vertex pieces by 120 degrees
3. reassemble and rotate into a mixed state
4. give to your least favorite "cube genius"
5. watch'em suffer as they try to solve it
6. Profit!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Someone wrote a program in Qbasic, and someone wrote a program in C. So far in this thread, we have reached the following conclusions from that limited information:
No matter what two languages are in the war, Java always ends up losing.
Yes, cube is fun.
One of my craziest cubing sessions: 6 cubes solved under water (world record). Got a video here:
http://grrroux.free.fr/
Do You know that in fact, Rubic's cube ("wonderful cube") is actually a business failure?
Look for it in Your local business schoolbook...
The cube was designed in the era of socialism. The manufacturing quality of the cube was soooo awful that finally the copies ruled the market and Rubic's company - or the country hardly earned some dollars from tha product that has been sold zillions in the world... typical hungarian business model...
I've tried to find the original story to be more authentic, but did not succeed yet...
Rubik's Cube Java applet with a very usable interface.
Also interesting for learning how to think about the projection of a 4D cube into 3D space (and actually onto the 2D space of the screen as well).
Here's a computer science Master's thesis that was done on solving the rubik's cube. And here's the accompanying presentation.
I don't think they would have had this problem had it been larger, so that the individual pieces were as big as and (presumably) as durable as the pieces in the original 3x3x3 cube.
I, for one, welcome our Rubiks' Cube Overlords!
Oh, wait...I AM one of the Rubiks' Cube Overlords!
I still have 37 different kids of Cubes sitting on my shelves. It's been a great part of my life.
Read more about it here: http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Sideline/2953/
Think about it. I love the 80s and ILT80s strikes back, new Care Bears and Ninja Turtles (so my friends tell me), and now the Rubiks Cube.
"4-by-4 cube with 16 squares per side." Unlike the less successful 4-by-4 cube with 19 squares per side.
After my first Revenge broke I bought another one and used the old one as spare parts. Needed those parts a couple of times on the new one. At the moment I don't remember where the "parts" cube is but the working 4x4x4 is (now) within arm's reach.
I'm tempted to scramble it but I'm not sure I can recall the one formula I memorized from a book, years ago. If you can do the 3x3x3 it's fairly easy to solve 99% of the 4x4x4 with the same moves. I could do the Revenge in 5 minutes or so, and, back in the day, won my junior high's 3x3x3 cube contest with a time of 52 seconds. Ah yes, the glory of a one paragraph write-up in the school newsletter... good times, good times.
Fun fact: the Revenge can simulate a 2x2x2 cube... just move two rows at a time. Good for practicing your 'corner' moves.
p.s. How long have we known that Rachael Leigh Cook is a cube/D&D geek?
p.p.s. One degree of RLC... I work with the husband of Rachael's former dentist's former dental assistant. Small world.
I dont understand his 'world champion record'. /., is his record.
He has a video on his site of him solving the cube in less than the 20 seconds which, according to
The woman who's method he uses has videos on her site where she solvs the cube in around 14 seconds, 16 seconds, etc.
Can anyone enlighten me?
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
of only being able to sovle one side, i found it to be a great paper weight.
That's easy! Next on the list: Rubik's Hypercube.
Don't forget the 4 dimensional rubik's cube
Knowing that people can solve this period... I never knew there were all these algorithms and stuff to do it.
... scramble the cube up real good and try my hardest to get it right. Never ever did.
I'd just
Boy do I feel stupid..
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
It's a small 5 button pyramid that requires logic, mathmatic, scientific, and critical thinking to solve all 100 of it's puzzles.
The device will talk during different puzzles, and you have to figure out the solution.
Hasbro has some information about it here: http://www.hasbro.com/nemesisfactor/?CFID=19321184 &CFTOKEN=92808386#
Actually, the Hungarian cubes were the very best back then, and are considered the best by many even today. I don't know too much about the economy of it, but I heard that cubes were over half of Hungary's export income for a while, so I think they did pretty well, even if the knockoff also made a lot of money.
Apparently only 21 people have ever solved it completely without software assistance. Ack!
I remember playing with a SOMA cube in my youth; I've not heard of it in decades, but somehow I enjoyed this puzzle far more than Rubick's cube.
Does anyone know if they're still available?
I googled for it, but apparently, somebody markets a drug with the same name, and it resists googling around it (Brave New World?).
Does anybody know what I'm talking about?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Being Maths undergrads we're talking about this amazing new toy - Rubik's cube.
I say 'Do you think it would be possible to do this thing in your head'
Toby, later a Post-doc quantum mechanics researcher was certain it couldn't be done.
I wasn't so sure - I thought that using some clever representation technique like mnemonics could make it doable with a lot of practice.
The next day we're all back in the same pub and John, saying nothing, put a solved cube in front of Toby. Toby shuffles it and hands it back. John studies each faces, shuts his eyes and about a minute later puts the cube down, solved.
Later another friend said that they'd seen him going into the toy shop about about 3pm. He'd learned how to solve the cube from scratch, in his head in under 4 hours!
Scary