Rubick's Cube

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I had one of the 8 sided ones which I figured out very quickly (before Christmas breakfast) despite being told it was supposed to be harder. They are slightly less bulky than the cube and don't have the same noise and jarriness that annoyed me with the cube. I don't think I solved the cube more than half a dozen times... and never really had a plan on how to do it. I suppose I could write a solution for the 8-sided one if I put my mind to it.
The thing that got me about most(99+%) of the myriad of people i'd see fiddlng with the cube was that they seemed to be trying to solve it randomly. Like they expected they were suddenly going to accidentally put all the bits in the right place

Rubick's Cubes have always been a struggle for me, so I never even attempt to try them anymore

Rubick's cube. Ugh. I could never for the life of me solve that stupid thing. It was so annoying!

I don't think it was very easy to solve it. I was too lazy to find by myself how to do it, so I read on the Internet, and found a method. With it I could solve it in one minute (60 seconds). But now I've forgotten some formulas, so using logic only, I can still solve it but it takes a little more time.

I tried that way, but it did not work. I could do two layers only.

Nope, I have never been able to solve a rubik's cube. I've sat and tried before, and got nowhere fast. In fact, I've never been able to do anything like that - my mind just goes completely blank with that sort of thing.

I did eventually solve mine, though not through any real ability. I was randomly twisting the sides for days on end then I got to a point where I could see how to complete in a few more moves. Luck took me most of the way.

As I say, it took many hours. It was a long time ago, but I think it was just over two days. I can't remember if I napped for a bit now and then. This was back when I was really INTO puzzles of all sorts. Most popular puzzles I could solve in a matter of a few to several minutes. Rubick's Cube pissed me off because I couldn't. I became obsessed with it instantly, and could NOT put it down until I solved it (I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't ~ I might still be in a padded room today because of it if I hadn't solved it).

No, there was no method, other than the fact that I quickly understood how changing the relative positions of the corner and side cubes change the relative positions of others. There was no "Turn side one a quarter turn, then side two a half turn," or anything like that. I just kept playing with it, watching how certain moves affected the positions of multiple cubes at once. It really was as if at some point, something just "clicked," I literally "saw" the solution, turned it a few times, and bam, it was done. The next day, I looked up one of the "methods," and never did it the same way I did it the first time again. Didn't need to. I just wanted to know if I could. I did, and that was enough for me.

To tell you the truth, it took me completely by surprise. I didn't think I was ever going to solve it on my own.

That's "kind of" what I did, but I would twist four or five times different sides, remember what I had done, then put it back. Each time just trying to observe what each series of steps did, or undid, as they were performed.

Now that I think of it, I supposed you could call that a method, but it was a method to learn to understand how it worked as opposed to a step by step solution.

I had one once that actually came with pictured solutions....and even then, I couldn't solve that thing for anything in the world. Just tried one of those online flash-based cubes and still couldn't solve the thing. It could be my dyscalculia's fault since I can solve most other puzzles except for a Rubik's cube.

No.

Are you talking about a trial-and-error approach, Mr. XXX? Playing around with something to figure out the underlying patterns is something that I've always preferred over a step-by-step read-the-instructions approach. Moar fiddling, less planning, for me. I didn't know that there were instructions for solving Rubik's cubes. For me, they would suck all the joy out of the playing.

Maybe a bit off topic - please tell me if I do something I shouldnt - but do you think most people seek to understand step by step process of dealing with problems or to undertand the more fundamental how?

I havent had the patience to figure out a rubix cube.

Last edited by Cogs on 02 Mar 2012, 8:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

No. Not really. Check two posts above (two of mine). I explained in more detail how I did it.



Same here. Pulling it apart, or following instructions would have ruined the whole purpose for me, at least the first time. Once I did it one time, I didn't care anymore.

lol I tried it by doing a computer program. It could solve only 5-6 moves or so. So I had the idea to compute in advance the set of positions that are reached by 5-6 moves, and then do the program search for it. It could then solve 11-12 moves.

By the way, about the sets of solutions, it is interesting to note that at each move, you go from Mi to Mi+1 or Mi-1. And if you compute all the moves (from 1 to ~20), in fact you find positions you already encountered before.

There is one first position. Then, you have 6 faces and 4 quarters, so in M1 there are 6*3 = 18 positions. Then you don't need to turn the face you just turned, so in {M1,M2} there are 18*15 positions. Then, you don't need to turn the face you just turned, and if you turned the opposite face, you don't need to turn the first either, so in {M1,M2,M3} there are less than 18*15*(15 * 4/5 + 12*1/5) = 18*15*14.4 etc.
The more you go, the less new solutions, until you reach to point k where the number of new solutions in {M1..Mk} is less than for M(k-1). I made a program to compute every position in the Tetraminx, and after the point k, there was very few moves until every position is found.


Well, if you get anywhere from here...

I had one when I was a kid, and had solved it a few times when I was alone. As soon as my mom saw me solve it, it suddenly disappeared. She's always been jealous of anything I've done that she couldn't do herself.

I succeeded one side with the right edges several times. The last time I tried, I had 14 cubes correctedly place, including one full side. However, nothing more.