Post by goldensandslash on May 3, 2021 22:28:52 GMT
So, over the course of the past year in quarantine, I've gotten really good at solving a Rubik's Cube. It's become kinda my thing. I've chatted about it a few times, both on IRC and elsewhere. And ever since then, I've noticed a lot of people make assumptions about it that simply aren't true. So I'm gonna go through ten of them and debunk these myths once and for all.
#1: You solve one color at a time.
This is false. If you look at the internal mechanism of a Rubik's Cube, you'll see that the pieces are multiple colors. The edge piece that separates the green side from the white side, for example, is the green-white edge. No matter how you move the cube, you'll never be able to separate the green from the white. Those two stickers will always stay together, since they are both on the same piece.
This means that you don't actually want to solve the colors, you want to solve the pieces. If you've put all the white stickers on one side, but the outer layer around the white side isn't solved, then you haven't actually solved the pieces.
There are many methods of solving the cube, such as CFOP, Roux, ZZ, Petrus, Belt, and probably others, but all of them solve the cube one layer at a time, not one side at a time. CFOP is, by far, the most commonly-used speedsolving method, and it solves the bottom and middle at the same time, and then solves the top. Roux, the next most common, solves the left and the right and then solves the middle. Either way, it's layer-by-layer. The other methods are pretty seldom used, but trust me, none of them solve it one side at a time.
#2: To solve a Rubik's Cube, you need to have a high IQ and/or be good at math.
People do think that I am doing math and calculations in my head as I solve the cube. This is not true. In reality, what I'm doing is looking at the colors on the cube, and finding a pattern that may look similar to patterns I've encountered on the cube before. There is no "calculation" involved, it's just memorization of what to do in each case.
#3: There is a very trivially easy way to solve the Rubik's Cube.
Yeah.... no. That's a lie.
The Rubik's Cube has existed since 1974 and been pretty popular throughout that entire time period. In that time, if there were a method that could effortlessly solve a cube, it'd be well-known by now. Cubers aren't just closely guarding some secret method that we withhold from the general public.
Now, there IS an easier method to solve it called "The Beginner's Method" that is designed to be easy to learn and easy to teach without necessarily being fast. But even with such a method, you need to put in the time and effort to memorize the moves and practice them before you can internalize the method. The Beginner's Method takes about ten minutes to learn and then a week or two of practice before it'll sink in.
It's possible that maybe in the next few decades, there will be some method developed that we can't conceive of now that can be easily learned in under a minute, but I highly doubt this. If it exists, we almost certainly would have found it by now.
Not to mention that if a super-secret easy method does exist, then what's the point of learning it? The entire point of learning to solve a Rubik's Cube is to show off the skill. If people know that it's not that hard and you didn't put in much effort into learning it, then there's no point in impressing people.
If you do a search on YouTube, you can find several videos that claim to teach a method to solve the Cube with just two moves, but these videos are all fake troll videos.
#4: It'll be harder to solve a cube if it takes a longer time to scramble it.
It seems that whenever someone wants to give a hard scramble to a cuber, they will scramble the cube for a long time, hide the cube so that the cuber doesn't see the scrambling, and/or try to separate out the colors so that stickers of the same color aren't next to each other.
None of this makes any difference.
First of all, if you're worried about the cuber seeing the scrambling... don't. If I can solve a Rubik's Cube anyways, there's no point in me bothering to watch you scramble it, since I can solve it regardless. Secondly, even if I were able to keep track of your moves and simply reverse them, I'd quickly lose track of it after six or seven moves. Looking at a cube that's been scrambled with at least that many moves and not having seen the scrambling before then, there's now way to reverse-engineer the scramble from just looking at it.
And if you've done twenty moves, as long as they are more-or-less random... then that's about as hard as you can get. Continuing past that point is unnecessary. In fact, depending on the individual cuber and what method they use, you still might give them a lucky case. If you REALLY want to mess with a cuber, here's what you do.
Most Cubers use either the Beginner's Method or the CFOP method. In either case, the starting thing to do is to make a cross on one of the sides. Most people start with the white side (no idea why this is what everyone teaches people, but it is). When examining the cube before starting to solve, the cuber will generally plan out the cross but not much more than that (official competitions allow for only 15 seconds of inspection). So if you make a hard white cross for them, then that's going to make the solve more difficult. Anything after the cross is pretty much impossible to plan, so just focus on making the white cross difficult. The way you do that is you put all of the white edge pieces on the yellow side (the opposite of white), but all of them with the white sticker facing outwards (so no white sticker touches the yellow center). This is pretty easy to do for all four pieces, but if you can't do so, then doing it with only three should be fine. There. Now that you know this, go mess with your local cubers.
#5: You know the entire solution before starting the solve.
I personally don't hear this one said a lot about myself, but about faster solvers and professionals. They solve the cube so fast that there's no time for them to stop and think about anything. The world record for solving a Rubik's Cube is 3.47 seconds, no time to think at all.
But thinking that they solve the whole cube in their head before starting the solve is false. What they are doing is a technique called "Look Ahead". While you're solving some pieces, you're thinking about the pieces that you're going to be solving next, and keeping an eye on them so that as soon as you finish the sequence of moves to solve the current pieces, you can just go straight into the next ones without pausing. This makes it look like you've planned out everything. In reality, though, these people are just predicting a few turns into the future, so that they can avoid pausing.
Human reaction time is really not that great, so you need to be able to look into the future to optimize your speed. This applies not just to cubing, but to any activity. For example, it's why Tetris shows you what the next few pieces that you will get are: the gameplay is better if you can look into the future.
#6: To be a speedcuber, you need a lot of natural talent.
While this one probably is true for the people who consistently get under 5 seconds, I am going to say that it's a falsehood overall. I think anyone can get under 20 seconds consistently if they practice enough.
Most skills do involve a mix of natural talent and practice, and cubing is no different. Your natural talent will affect your rate of improvement and where you peak at, but hard work is far more important than any natural talent.
Of course, if you want to be the best in the world, you will need both, but you'd be surprised what you can accomplish on your own with a lot of hard work. And that applies not just to cubing, but to life in general. If you want to amaze yourself at how well you can do any skill, a lot of hard work will get you there.
#7: Solving a Rubik's Cube is a mental challenge.
Yeah... no.
It seems like it at first, but once you've done it a few times, the challenge is gone and you can solve it consistently every single time. But this isn't the end of the road. Much like a tennis player doesn't quit playing tennis once they can consistently hit the ball over the net, cubers don't quit cubing either.
So why do we do it if not for the challenge? Well, a few reasons. Some people like to be able to solve faster and faster. Some people like to learn new techniques to optimize their solves. Some people like to break down mental and physical barriers that they never thought possible. Some people enjoy going to competitions (both to compete in, and just to hang out with other people who share a common hobby with them). Some people want to learn how to solve more types of puzzles.
All hobbies are always more interesting than they seem from the initial outside perception.
#8: It's harder to solve bigger cubes than smaller cubes.
The world record for biggest Rubik's Cube is a custom 3D-printed 33x33x33 Rubik's Cube. I've never once seen it in person, but I can say, extremely confidently, that I would be able to solve this cube. Why? Because I know how to solve big cubes in general.
Once you get past the 3x3x3, and learn the 4x4x4, then you're pretty much good to go (there is one case on a 5x5x5 and above that you might not know how to handle at first, but if you give it a little thought, it's pretty easy to figure out on your own if you know how to solve a 4x4x4).
Bigger cubes don't get harder. The way you solve a big cube is a method called "Reduction".
If you imagine an already-solved big cube, and you try scrambling it, but you ONLY turn the outermost layers, then it's essentially a 3x3x3, since all the middle layers are grouped together. When solving a big cube that's scrambled for real, you reduce it down to this. First, you form each of the centers around the cube, essentially solving all but the outermost layers. Then, while keeping the centers solved, you pair up all of the edge pieces so that they are with the edges of the same colors, and so you've now reduced it down to a 3x3x3 and can solve it by only turning the outer layer, and treating it like a 3x3x3.
Well, mostly.
A bigger cube might have what we call a "parity error", which is when it contains a case that would not be possible on a 3x3x3, such as a single flipped edge or two swapped corners. In these cases, you simply need to learn an algorithm to fix each of these, but once this is done, these same algorithms can be used on any bigger cube to solve the same issue.
Now, going back to the 33x33x33, if I were given the opportunity to solve it, yes I could. However... it'd probably take me a month or two. This is because there's more pieces to solve, and so the time it takes to get to the point of reducing it to a 3x3x3 will take longer. But it taking longer does not mean it being more difficult. It's the same exact method, it just takes more time.
#9: A Cuber's brain works differently than a non-Cuber's brain.
I mean, this is TECHNICALLY correct, since no two people's brains work identically to one another. But no person's brain works like a computer.
Cubers are not any better than Non-Cubers at speed, memorization, or visualization. It's just that they've put in the effort to refine those skills. If it looks like I'm doing something that you can't, whether cubing or not, I guarantee you it's for one of three reasons.
One, I've practiced the skill a lot more than you have. In fact, some cubers are young enough that they have been doing this for literally their entire life.
Two, I'm using some technique that you don't know about. As an example, there are people who are able to solve a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. When I first learned this, I erroneously assumed that they could mentally keep track of where each piece went as they turned the cube. That's not actually the case. What they are doing is very specific algorithms that can swap two pieces of the cube while leaving the rest of the cube intact. So with this, they only need to memorize the initial state of the cube, and then plan out which swaps to do in which order. And since there are only twenty pieces of the cube (yeah, fifty-four stickers, but only twenty pieces), it's easy to do. Memorizing twenty pieces seems like a lot, but you can memorize it easier by converting each piece to a letter, and then writing a short story with those letters, and learning the story.
Three, it could be both of the above at once. This is why the world record for solving a 3x3x3 cube blindfolded is 15.50 seconds. To use a non-cubing example, a professional chess player can tell you what your best move is before you've even looked around the board and examined all your options. And it's also how some people can memorize the order of a deck of cards faster than you can deal out the cards. They're using techniques unfamiliar to you AND have put in more practice into refining those techniques.
The human brain is not as good as a computer, but it can go further than you ever imagined. And that applies to everyone's brains, not just those of Cubers.
#10: Other people can solve a Rubik's Cube, but *I* will never be able to.
This is just pessimistic thinking. There are loads of different tutorials online, making it easier than ever to get into the hobby.
So...
Yes. You can.
#1: You solve one color at a time.
This is false. If you look at the internal mechanism of a Rubik's Cube, you'll see that the pieces are multiple colors. The edge piece that separates the green side from the white side, for example, is the green-white edge. No matter how you move the cube, you'll never be able to separate the green from the white. Those two stickers will always stay together, since they are both on the same piece.
This means that you don't actually want to solve the colors, you want to solve the pieces. If you've put all the white stickers on one side, but the outer layer around the white side isn't solved, then you haven't actually solved the pieces.
There are many methods of solving the cube, such as CFOP, Roux, ZZ, Petrus, Belt, and probably others, but all of them solve the cube one layer at a time, not one side at a time. CFOP is, by far, the most commonly-used speedsolving method, and it solves the bottom and middle at the same time, and then solves the top. Roux, the next most common, solves the left and the right and then solves the middle. Either way, it's layer-by-layer. The other methods are pretty seldom used, but trust me, none of them solve it one side at a time.
#2: To solve a Rubik's Cube, you need to have a high IQ and/or be good at math.
People do think that I am doing math and calculations in my head as I solve the cube. This is not true. In reality, what I'm doing is looking at the colors on the cube, and finding a pattern that may look similar to patterns I've encountered on the cube before. There is no "calculation" involved, it's just memorization of what to do in each case.
#3: There is a very trivially easy way to solve the Rubik's Cube.
Yeah.... no. That's a lie.
The Rubik's Cube has existed since 1974 and been pretty popular throughout that entire time period. In that time, if there were a method that could effortlessly solve a cube, it'd be well-known by now. Cubers aren't just closely guarding some secret method that we withhold from the general public.
Now, there IS an easier method to solve it called "The Beginner's Method" that is designed to be easy to learn and easy to teach without necessarily being fast. But even with such a method, you need to put in the time and effort to memorize the moves and practice them before you can internalize the method. The Beginner's Method takes about ten minutes to learn and then a week or two of practice before it'll sink in.
It's possible that maybe in the next few decades, there will be some method developed that we can't conceive of now that can be easily learned in under a minute, but I highly doubt this. If it exists, we almost certainly would have found it by now.
Not to mention that if a super-secret easy method does exist, then what's the point of learning it? The entire point of learning to solve a Rubik's Cube is to show off the skill. If people know that it's not that hard and you didn't put in much effort into learning it, then there's no point in impressing people.
If you do a search on YouTube, you can find several videos that claim to teach a method to solve the Cube with just two moves, but these videos are all fake troll videos.
#4: It'll be harder to solve a cube if it takes a longer time to scramble it.
It seems that whenever someone wants to give a hard scramble to a cuber, they will scramble the cube for a long time, hide the cube so that the cuber doesn't see the scrambling, and/or try to separate out the colors so that stickers of the same color aren't next to each other.
None of this makes any difference.
First of all, if you're worried about the cuber seeing the scrambling... don't. If I can solve a Rubik's Cube anyways, there's no point in me bothering to watch you scramble it, since I can solve it regardless. Secondly, even if I were able to keep track of your moves and simply reverse them, I'd quickly lose track of it after six or seven moves. Looking at a cube that's been scrambled with at least that many moves and not having seen the scrambling before then, there's now way to reverse-engineer the scramble from just looking at it.
And if you've done twenty moves, as long as they are more-or-less random... then that's about as hard as you can get. Continuing past that point is unnecessary. In fact, depending on the individual cuber and what method they use, you still might give them a lucky case. If you REALLY want to mess with a cuber, here's what you do.
Most Cubers use either the Beginner's Method or the CFOP method. In either case, the starting thing to do is to make a cross on one of the sides. Most people start with the white side (no idea why this is what everyone teaches people, but it is). When examining the cube before starting to solve, the cuber will generally plan out the cross but not much more than that (official competitions allow for only 15 seconds of inspection). So if you make a hard white cross for them, then that's going to make the solve more difficult. Anything after the cross is pretty much impossible to plan, so just focus on making the white cross difficult. The way you do that is you put all of the white edge pieces on the yellow side (the opposite of white), but all of them with the white sticker facing outwards (so no white sticker touches the yellow center). This is pretty easy to do for all four pieces, but if you can't do so, then doing it with only three should be fine. There. Now that you know this, go mess with your local cubers.
#5: You know the entire solution before starting the solve.
I personally don't hear this one said a lot about myself, but about faster solvers and professionals. They solve the cube so fast that there's no time for them to stop and think about anything. The world record for solving a Rubik's Cube is 3.47 seconds, no time to think at all.
But thinking that they solve the whole cube in their head before starting the solve is false. What they are doing is a technique called "Look Ahead". While you're solving some pieces, you're thinking about the pieces that you're going to be solving next, and keeping an eye on them so that as soon as you finish the sequence of moves to solve the current pieces, you can just go straight into the next ones without pausing. This makes it look like you've planned out everything. In reality, though, these people are just predicting a few turns into the future, so that they can avoid pausing.
Human reaction time is really not that great, so you need to be able to look into the future to optimize your speed. This applies not just to cubing, but to any activity. For example, it's why Tetris shows you what the next few pieces that you will get are: the gameplay is better if you can look into the future.
#6: To be a speedcuber, you need a lot of natural talent.
While this one probably is true for the people who consistently get under 5 seconds, I am going to say that it's a falsehood overall. I think anyone can get under 20 seconds consistently if they practice enough.
Most skills do involve a mix of natural talent and practice, and cubing is no different. Your natural talent will affect your rate of improvement and where you peak at, but hard work is far more important than any natural talent.
Of course, if you want to be the best in the world, you will need both, but you'd be surprised what you can accomplish on your own with a lot of hard work. And that applies not just to cubing, but to life in general. If you want to amaze yourself at how well you can do any skill, a lot of hard work will get you there.
#7: Solving a Rubik's Cube is a mental challenge.
Yeah... no.
It seems like it at first, but once you've done it a few times, the challenge is gone and you can solve it consistently every single time. But this isn't the end of the road. Much like a tennis player doesn't quit playing tennis once they can consistently hit the ball over the net, cubers don't quit cubing either.
So why do we do it if not for the challenge? Well, a few reasons. Some people like to be able to solve faster and faster. Some people like to learn new techniques to optimize their solves. Some people like to break down mental and physical barriers that they never thought possible. Some people enjoy going to competitions (both to compete in, and just to hang out with other people who share a common hobby with them). Some people want to learn how to solve more types of puzzles.
All hobbies are always more interesting than they seem from the initial outside perception.
#8: It's harder to solve bigger cubes than smaller cubes.
The world record for biggest Rubik's Cube is a custom 3D-printed 33x33x33 Rubik's Cube. I've never once seen it in person, but I can say, extremely confidently, that I would be able to solve this cube. Why? Because I know how to solve big cubes in general.
Once you get past the 3x3x3, and learn the 4x4x4, then you're pretty much good to go (there is one case on a 5x5x5 and above that you might not know how to handle at first, but if you give it a little thought, it's pretty easy to figure out on your own if you know how to solve a 4x4x4).
Bigger cubes don't get harder. The way you solve a big cube is a method called "Reduction".
If you imagine an already-solved big cube, and you try scrambling it, but you ONLY turn the outermost layers, then it's essentially a 3x3x3, since all the middle layers are grouped together. When solving a big cube that's scrambled for real, you reduce it down to this. First, you form each of the centers around the cube, essentially solving all but the outermost layers. Then, while keeping the centers solved, you pair up all of the edge pieces so that they are with the edges of the same colors, and so you've now reduced it down to a 3x3x3 and can solve it by only turning the outer layer, and treating it like a 3x3x3.
Well, mostly.
A bigger cube might have what we call a "parity error", which is when it contains a case that would not be possible on a 3x3x3, such as a single flipped edge or two swapped corners. In these cases, you simply need to learn an algorithm to fix each of these, but once this is done, these same algorithms can be used on any bigger cube to solve the same issue.
Now, going back to the 33x33x33, if I were given the opportunity to solve it, yes I could. However... it'd probably take me a month or two. This is because there's more pieces to solve, and so the time it takes to get to the point of reducing it to a 3x3x3 will take longer. But it taking longer does not mean it being more difficult. It's the same exact method, it just takes more time.
#9: A Cuber's brain works differently than a non-Cuber's brain.
I mean, this is TECHNICALLY correct, since no two people's brains work identically to one another. But no person's brain works like a computer.
Cubers are not any better than Non-Cubers at speed, memorization, or visualization. It's just that they've put in the effort to refine those skills. If it looks like I'm doing something that you can't, whether cubing or not, I guarantee you it's for one of three reasons.
One, I've practiced the skill a lot more than you have. In fact, some cubers are young enough that they have been doing this for literally their entire life.
Two, I'm using some technique that you don't know about. As an example, there are people who are able to solve a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. When I first learned this, I erroneously assumed that they could mentally keep track of where each piece went as they turned the cube. That's not actually the case. What they are doing is very specific algorithms that can swap two pieces of the cube while leaving the rest of the cube intact. So with this, they only need to memorize the initial state of the cube, and then plan out which swaps to do in which order. And since there are only twenty pieces of the cube (yeah, fifty-four stickers, but only twenty pieces), it's easy to do. Memorizing twenty pieces seems like a lot, but you can memorize it easier by converting each piece to a letter, and then writing a short story with those letters, and learning the story.
Three, it could be both of the above at once. This is why the world record for solving a 3x3x3 cube blindfolded is 15.50 seconds. To use a non-cubing example, a professional chess player can tell you what your best move is before you've even looked around the board and examined all your options. And it's also how some people can memorize the order of a deck of cards faster than you can deal out the cards. They're using techniques unfamiliar to you AND have put in more practice into refining those techniques.
The human brain is not as good as a computer, but it can go further than you ever imagined. And that applies to everyone's brains, not just those of Cubers.
#10: Other people can solve a Rubik's Cube, but *I* will never be able to.
This is just pessimistic thinking. There are loads of different tutorials online, making it easier than ever to get into the hobby.
So...
Yes. You can.