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Rubik's Cube Comeback

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the missing-link-still-less-popular dept.

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.

2 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. If you want to solve it. by Kjellander · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Fun cube facts by arvindn · · Score: 5, Informative


    * 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.