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.

Comments

If you want to solve it.

[Kjellander]

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.

palmtop qubit simulator?

[Doc Ruby]

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?

Fun cube facts

[arvindn]

* 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.

Re:Fun cube facts

[skinny.net]

Erno Rubik didn't solve his 1st cube in over a month, and didn't know if it was possible until then.
The best averages I've ever heard of are in the low 17's. 12 seconds is outrageous and would surely be a lucky case, where the last layer was coincidentally solved.
Blindfolded cubers that I've read of have a 15 minute study time.
Many people can solve a 20x20x20 cube (like the one at oinkleburger, but even some of the fastest people in the world (like Chris )take hours and hours to do it.
The world's fastest one handed cuber has a video (see last link, Chris) of his world record solve with one hand.
God's algorithm is available online...you painstakingly input your cube's current orientation and it comes back with the turns to solve it. if the cube will take 18 or more turns (which is rare), you'll be letting your machine churn overnight, it does every possible turn!
My name is skinny and I'm a cubaholic!

Re:Still can't solve one

[TenPin22]

If you think about it it for very long you find that you can't solve by sides as each piece can be in more than one position on its side and the side still be correct but other sides incorrect.

If you solve it by layers then you makes sure that each corner/edge piece is correct for its layer with respect to its sides and you can ignore the unsolved layers while you do the current one.

Re:did anyone actually solve it?

[tessaiga]

I got one of these at a job fair from Microsoft recently. I'd never actually been able to solve one before, but now with the power of Google, I thought I'd try for a first.

Turns out it's easy to find links to speed cubing pages, but for people like me who just want an easy-to-understand (as opposed to super-fast) solution you have to dig a bit. The best explanation I found was Denny's 3x3 cubing page, which uses a layer-by-layer approach that's pretty intuitive. The only drawback was that it doesn't cover what to do about logos, which need to be oriented in a specific way (as opposed to just being on the right face); for that one, try Matt Monroe's page.