I hate the G perm the most, I can prove it.

Note: This a rather cube-oriented post, and will be better if you have a cube with you, and will be a lot better if you're fully familiar with Singmaster notation.

Warning: These algorithms are only useful for academic purposes and will probably just slow you down in the long run. Learn the lesson, not the algorithms.

I still don't do CFOP that well, and if you're just learning it now, you should have fewer bad habits than me because you have the benefit of years of refinement of the method even before you ever saw any algorithms.

I was rather skeptical about the CFOP method when I first encountered it, because I didn't think that most people would be able to memorize algorithms for 80ish last layer cases (57 orientation cases, or OLLs and 21 permutation cases, or PLLs) in addition to some specialized F2L (first two layer) cases. But, I was using a method that needs less than 20 algorithms and had just barely caught up to the speed of its creator only years later. In the meantime, CFOP times kept going down. I later figured out that there were potentially a decent number of mirror image cases that kept the number of cases manageable.

I also realized that when I had used a layer by layer method, I had the decided disadvantage of having learned one (Nourse) that left the solved layer up instead of one that leaves the solved layer down (Taylor). While I saw the move efficiency of putting the middle layer edges in with the first layer corners, I still had been working with the bad habit of not turning the cube over until I finished the first two layers.

When I finally accepted that I should start learning some PLL's, the two major resources I was looking at was speedcubing.com, and Jessica Fridrich's page. I probably started with the U perm, because I figured out that R2US'U2SUR2  is just the same as the U2M'U2M edge 3-cycle with some setup moves. I was OK with left-handed and right-handed versions of that easily enough. I may have learned the T perm next, and was so glad that it was symmetrical and I didn't have to learn a second version of it. Strangely, the version of the T perm that I learned is the inverse of one of the algorithms on the speedcubing.com page (but hey - it's symmetrical so it's also functionally its own inverse), so I'm not sure how I got to that version of the algorithm. But, I digress - and it's going to look like I'm doing it some more but bear with me. If you want to play along, this would be a good time to grab a cube.

For the N perm, I took the easy-to-memorize route, and went with  

LU'RU2L'UR' LU'RU2L'UR' U 

because the first segment and the second segment are the same thing. This was the first of the PLLs that I learned that had a diagonal swap, do I had to use this a lot when I was still doing 4 look last layer.

So if you start with a solved cube, and do the first segment of that move, you get the fr and bl F2L pairs swapped, and you get two U-layer corner-edge pairs swapped, like the J perm. Doing the second segment resolves the two F2L pairs, and swaps the second set of U layer corner-edge pars, creating the N perm.

I also figured out that if you inserted a U' or a U move in the middle of the N perm above, cancelling part of the U layer swap from the first segment to the second, you got a J perm. I later learned a better algorithm for one of the J perms, but I still use the method above for the other.

So, in my weird bag of cube tricks, I knew that there was another way to fix the 2 F2L pairs that were undone by the first part of the N perm. Start with a solved cube again.

LU'RU2L'UR'  y  L'R'U2LR gets you something that looks like... Could it be? The G perm! So now, I just had to reverse engineer it. (Put down your cube momentarily.)

The G perm isn't really all the way symmetrical the way we would like, and it's not its own inverse. Therefore, you need four versions of the move. Left-handed, right-handed, left inverse, and right inverse.

The version of the G perm that the above example solves is with headlights on the front, and a bar on the back with the ub and the ubr pieces. The mirror image is still headlights on the front and the bar between ub and ubl. For a long while, this was as far as I was, as I had not bothered to write down the move and properly figure out the inverse.

Headlights on the back, bar on the right between ur and ufr, which is what you might have if you did the above bold move from a solved cube, (OK pick up the cube again...) is solved with

L'R'U2LR y' LU'RU2L'UR'.

And you should be back to a solved cube.

Now you could try the other two, the mirror images. Like before, one will undo the other.

R'UL'U2RU'L y' RLU2L'R', 

and LRU2L'R' y R'UL'U2RU'L.

So, while I can't recommend these algorithms to anyone other than just for academic interest or just basic insight into the algorithm building process, I hope that someone can use this to actually make some better algorithms.

Just a little more dissection of the 22.95 solve, this time LSE.

 I apparently could not wait to do more typing about the 22.95 Minh Thai solve.  Scroll down to the previous post if you're not caught up here.

LSE refers to Last Six Edges. Four of them are in one of the slice layers, and then you have one edge each on the two other layers. Technically, this term didn't exist until the Roux method was proposed, but that's exactly where you find yourself in Minh Thai's method once you have completed three edges each on two opposite sides.

If you look at the last part of the reconstruction from last time, you have this:

u R' E' R E2 R E R' // LSE 
R2 E E' r2 E M2 E' // centers

If you would like to skip ahead to this part of the solve, perform this on a solved cube: 

z’ D2 U2 F' D2 F' U2 F' L2 F' R2 F' R2 F' L' R' U' L' R F D' from standard solved white top/green front. 

So, looking at the moves that are labeled as "LSE", but from the standpoint of Minh's solution guide, I see that breaks down as follows:

u // Aligns upper and lower layers

R' E' R // Puts upper edge in lower target position From Stage III, part 2 (pg 48) "If both (edges) are somewhere in the horizontal middle layer, it will be easy to flip either one of them into the other one's target position."

E2 // puts lower edge in position to be matched with upper Setup move to do Case #2

R E R' // inserts both edges similar to stage III, part 2 case 2.

At this point, all we have is a Dot Case, and there is no edge orientation to do. So, this is a big skip at this point. Perhaps that's why there's the (E - E' ) in the centers because he's excited, or maybe he's just checking to make sure one of the edges in the back isn't flipped first before he fixes the centers. If he had edge orientation to complete, that would have been between 9 and 14 more moves, at least half of which would have been slice moves. Unlike modern cubes, slices can be quite an effort on 80's cubes. So, without that, you get to skip straight to edge permutation, and while it's the worst one, it's not that bad.

So again, we learned that this solve had relatively simple components, a little luck, and was not a  byproduct of a large available algorithm set.

Because Social Media isn't Verbose, and CLL isn't as common in 1982.

 People have complained to me on more than one occasion that I am verbose. As far as I know, this is a completely undesirable trait most of the time. However, I am always found wanting more information and specificity when I ask about things, so I have attempted to learn how to (mostly) politely interrogate people so that I get the sort of answers that I'm looking for.

When I'm the person giving the answers, it's terrible, but mostly because I have given more answer than the other party wanted, and even sometimes to questions that the other party only wanted a meaningless superficial answer to. I have been told on more than one occasion that I talk too much or overexplain, and even once have been told in response that "people aren't going to read my @#$%^$%$$% novel" when I typed out a thorough answer to something.

Every once in a while, I see something that's a tiny bit underexplained, and it bugs me, but I usually have enough sense to not cause problems. What follows is a byproduct of me now fixing something that was a little bit under-explained (or oversimplified, you pick) and I finally bothered to sort it out myself.

So the first Rubik's cube official record was Minh Thai's 22.95. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJTZhgrbgt8&t=325s

And, thanks to reddit users /u/qqwref and /u/BrestCubing, a lot of important solves have been reconstructed - including this one - and we'll get to that.  Most of the modern solves are done with a method that everyone is more familiar with, what used to be called Fridrich and is now referred to as CFOP. But, Minh's solve is done with his own method, and it's even well documented. ("The Winning Solution", ISBN 0-440-09795-9, 1982.) 

Minh's book was a step ahead of many things that were available at the time because he had individual orientation algorithms for the second set of corners, when nearly every other solution book had some sort of incremental method for orienting the second set of corners. It was one of the first published cube books to explicitly detail and demonstrate the idea that if you had more algorithms at your disposal you could solve faster.  Interestingly enough, there were also a handful of extra algorithms in the examples that started to make me consider the idea that Minh had actually been able to orient and permute second layer corners in a single algorithm.

So, that leads me to the reconstruction. Michael Gottlieb's (qqwref) reconstruction is as follows:

U L2 D' B2 U' R2 B2 F2 D' F2 L2 R2 F R2 D L2 R2 B' L' D' R F' 


x2 y // inspection 
D' R u D R' y' D' R D R' // FL corners + 1 edge 
y D r' E' L // FL center + 2nd edge 
z2 U y l D R' z' R' x z' r' R2 U2 z D R2 D2 // CLL 
R' l' z M D2 M' // FL 3rd edge 
z2 y R z' M z R' // LL 1st edge 
z' r' L' z D R' E R // LL 2nd edge 
U' u' R E' R' // LL 3rd edge 
u R' E' R E2 R E R' // LSE 
R2 E E' r2 E M2 E' // centers

 

This is typical of modern reconstructions. The scramble is shown first, starting from a solved cube with white on top and green on front, moves are shown in standard Singmaster notation, including cube rotations, and double slashes at the end of a line to give a place to put comments.  So, at the end of line four there, it says "CLL". The implication there is that Minh solved both permutation and orientation in a single algorithm. However, that's not the case. Also, it's largely overlooked because it's typically more move-efficient to orient first before permuting. So, here's my marked-up version of the reconstruction. I added notes in one color and comments in another so I could keep track. The Stage/Section references are from Minh's solution guide.

 

U L2 D' B2 U' R2 B2 F2 D' F2 L2 R2 F R2 D L2 R2 B' L' D' R F'

x2 y // inspection  yellow top, red front 

D' R u D R' (y' D') R D R' // FL corners + 1 edge ends with orange corners on top but still yellow top red front 

(y D) r' E' L // FL center + 2nd edge ends with orange on front, red corners need diagonal swap 

 z2 U y l D R' z' R' x z' r' // corners in correct cycle, orange on bottom 

This is equivalent to the permutation algorithm in Stage 2, Section 1, C3, (LFUF’U’L’) with cube rotations and wide moves.  This is permutation only, so I wouldn’t exactly count this as CLL. 

 R2 U2 z D R2 D2 // CLL corners oriented, orange on left  

This is equivalent to the orientation algorithm in Stage 2, Section 2, T7, (R2 F2 R F2 R2) with one cube rotation. 

R' l' z M D2 M' // FL 3rd edge 

z2 y R z' M z R' // LL 1st edge 

z' r' L' z D R' E R // LL 2nd edge 

U' u' R E' R' // LL 3rd edge keyhole piece is at ‘dr’ for the LL edges 

u R' E' R E2 R E R' // LSE 

R2 E E' r2 E M2 E' // centers

Taking another look at this reconstruction solidified two things for me - one, the confirmation that he wasn't doing full CLL, and second, that he rarely performs any sort of F or F' moves despite how often they appear in his solution guide. I had already gotten a sense of that from some other video of him, but it was nice to have the confirmation from a good reconstruction.

So, that's not to say that _nobody_ was doing CLL in the 80's, it just wasn't Minh Thai. Mark Waterman has a well-documented (on the web, at least) corners first solution that has a CLL step.

The next time we take a swing at this, I will have to look at the "LSE" step.

Yes, I still cube. Sometimes I type, too.

So I found out in the last month or so that I'm no longer in the top 100 in Florida on 3x3x3, the standard regular Rubik's cube. Also, I didn't get to sign up for a competition in June that I kind of wanted to go to because I was being distracted by life. But, competitions aren't really my everyday focus at this point. I think that I have more to say when I'm showing someone about cubing, and making it more accessible to them from an intellectual standpoint.

I managed to make it out to one of our local Mexican food places with the wife just the other night. We hadn't been out to dinner in a while, and I thought maybe I could do better than Taco Bell. They make guacamole right at the table. When he asked us if we wanted mild, medium, or spicy, we're joking about whether or not he means authentic medium or chardonnay-drinking-housewives-listening-to-Coldplay medium. We're seated outside, and it's warm enough out that we're enjoying the fact that we have both Mexican Coca-Cola and water to drink because we're sweating just sitting there. Some random guy showed up around the same time as our guacamole technician with a large Labrador and just wants to have it sit with someone while he goes in and gets alcoholic beverages. The people next to us who were just finishing seem to have enough room near them to accommodate the dog, and our guacamole tech commented about how the dog is being good. I turn my attention to the cube I have on the table for a moment, and since I was looking down I saw a person walking a dog on the other side of us, and predictably the Labrador was no longer just sitting there, but charted an intercept course to find the other dog. The Labrador reappeared, and then went to have a word with some people at the other tables about what it was that they were having for dinner. One of the servers had enough sense to bring the dog some water, and it sat back in its original spot, but now the people sitting there were really looking to go at this point - both because of the dog awkwardness and because they had been finished with their food for a bit already. Thankfully the gentleman whose dog it was reappeared, and talked with everyone again. He even asked how old our guacamole tech was, and said how proud he is of him for being a 16-year old with a job.

We went on to enjoy our guacamole and chips, ordered some tacos, and the couple watching the dog can now leave, and the servers went about the business of rearranging two tables so that a somewhat larger group could sit there. The group of six was an older man, and his wife, and a collection of  twenty-something children and perhaps a girlfriend. or My wife and I enjoyed our meal, talked about how customer service is supposed to work, and talked about how we are both readjusting to how our jobs have changed over the last couple of months. It isn't until the check was done and we're about to leave, that the one person sitting in the group of six that can see (the presumed father of the family) that I have a cube at the table mentioned it to the person that's closest to me but has his back to me. So, I brought the cube over, and the father mentions that the person closes to me, a bearded college-age person, could solve it.

At this point, my focus went to the college age person. I asked him how long it takes him to solve it, and what method he uses. Since he does something that's between a beginner's method and what we now refer to as CFOP, and takes around a minute and a half, I showed him the 80's corners first method that I do. I talked through most of it, and I probably wasn't that fast. He was intrigued, but he wasn't exactly impressed that I could tell. I was concerned that I had flubbed my demonstration, but was ready for followup questions. I did not get to do followup questions, because the young woman diagonally opposite him at the table immediately reached for the cube to scramble it again. Perhaps I had impressed her more, or she had seen it less. I try to nonchalantly stand around while she's scrambling it and not watch her scramble it, but I'm still trying to stand close enough to listen to make sure that nobody's hand-twisting corners or popping the cube apart. Thankfully there were no shenanigans. So now, I usually for a second demo try to do CFOP, and show how it's different because of looking for more than one piece at a time during the first two layers. This solve went noticeably faster, even despite me talking through it. The young woman got to watch the solve up close this time, and the bearded young man was more impressed this time. Then, while I'm still standing at the far corner, I do a silly cube trick just as comic relief. All it is you do R2 U2 R2 U2 R2 U2 to a solved cube, and you will see that you have two pairs of edges swapped. If you grip the cube properly, and only are touching the unsolved edges, you can perform that same move again without letting go of the cube and so it goes from unsolved to solved and it seems like your hands are exactly where they started (but they aren't). She even had me do the silly cube trick again so she could video it. (No, I don't know where it ended up yet.) So as I'm walking back around the table, I turn the cube a few times in my and ask the bearded young man if he had heard of Steven Brundage, which he had. I showed him the scrambled cube in my hand, explained a little bit about what it was that Steven Brundage does, and using the cover of the high back chair next to him, I then was able to fix the cube quickly and produce it for the group solved again. So, now, I didn't have to worry if he was impressed or not because I think he definitely was by then. We definitely had to go at that point, because I can't really take questions after doing the Brundage trick.

I also got to do a little bit of a demo for my corner gas station/vape shop/convenience store the next day, and I think I learned from the night before not to end with the tricks, but I also had enough time to show off a Roux solve. So that one went 80's - CFOP - Roux - What is an Inverse?. I told them that there would be a quiz next time, but I think that's an idle threat unless they start selling cubes there.

This is what I like to do, though. I really enjoy doing these small demos for people. Honestly, I hope that the fact that I've been doing it is why I'm not in the top 100 in Florida any more. I hope that enough new people have gotten into cubing as a byproduct of people like me making it more accessible that the pool of people competing has grown in size.

In other cubing news, I finally purchased a Rubik's Tactile Cube which means I can now finally say that I've solved a cube without looking at it. I was very happy with the choice of shapes on the opposite sides. I was also very happy that even though it's the modern Rubik's mechanism that's harder to pop, it was set up just loose enough that it was a delight to turn the first time out of the package.

Cubes and Lawyers Part 2: Countersuit!

This is just a followup to one of the items in a previous post about legal action by Rubik's Brand, Ltd.

In response to aggressive action by Rubik's, TheCubicle has put together a countersuit. Here's the explanation from Phil from TheCubicle, from his post on reddit.com/r/cubers :

Hi Everyone,

This is Phil from TheCubicle. I'm posting here to give everyone an update on the legal situation with Rubik's Brand Limited.

On Friday, February 2, Cubicle Enterprises LLC has filed a lawsuit against Rubik’s Brand Limited seeking cancellation of four of its trademarks on the basis of utilitarian functionality, genericness, and fraud, as well as treble damages for various antitrust violations related to trademark misuse and attempted and actual monopolization. The suit also requests a declaratory judgment that TheCubicle has not violated Rubik’s purported federal and state trademark rights.

This controversy first arose in October 2017, when Rubik’s sued TheCubicle for trademark infringement, threatening to shut down its business and strip away its assets, effectively destroying the livelihoods of our employees and their ability to serve the community. A line of dialogue with Rubik’s was quickly opened in hopes of resolving the dispute productively and amicably. However, the painstakingly frustrating negotiations that followed made it clear that Rubik’s legal claims were unsubstantiated and dealing with Rubik’s was impossible.

It has also become clear that Rubik’s wants complete control of speedcubing and is willing to resort to bullying, intimidation, abuse of intellectual property law, and monopolistic tactics, including illegal tying activities, in its attempt to get it. We will not allow this to happen.

Rubik’s fails to see that our community is built on the bonds of friendship, trust, and the spirit of fair play. We grow together as cubers and people, and this is what makes our community special.

Our world of sharing ideas, helping each other as friends, and competing at our best under fair rules with our favorite cube products from sources chosen by cubers is something that should never be tainted by Rubik’s voracious greed to control and dominate.

We will not allow Rubik’s to leverage its invalid intellectual property, monopolistic demands, and other threats against its competitors to oppress us or limit the opportunities for expanding cubing, both for competitors and fans. We will not allow its attempt at perpetuating a monopoly to be successful. And, we will not allow the shadow of Rubik’s to loom over us anymore.

For these reasons, we took action in Federal court to stop Rubik’s from threatening our company and the survival of its business operations, our community, and the market.

We cannot thank our community enough for its support and understanding. The past few months have been extremely challenging, and we are beyond appreciative of the overwhelming support and expressions of solidarity from everyone around us.

We tried to settle this on reasonable terms with Rubik’s, but it became apparent that Rubik’s was not bargaining in good faith and that it was necessary to protect our community through this litigation. We are confident in the strength of our legal claims against Rubik’s, and will continue to do our best in this difficult situation. We look forward to representing the cubing community’s interests.

A copy of our complaint: https://thecubicle.us/Info/ECF1_Complaint.pdf Accompanying exhibits: https://thecubicle.us/Info/ECF1_Complaint_Exhibits.zip YouTube video: https://youtu.be/A11ggIu6n8E

Also just recently, the Rubik's Brand/Red Bull tournament has announced their first event. This tournament would be the first of its kind after Rubik's failed attempt to reach some sort of agreement with the WCA. Several other dates in other locations have been planned. Similarly to TheCubicle, the WCA was not amenable to what they perceived as strongarm tacticts to take over competitive cubing and chose not to work with Rubik's and Red Bull on these events.

I disassemble things so you don't have to.

At a recent gig, I was solving my big 12cm Paladone cube. It's fun at night because it lights up, and it's less obvious on stage than leaving a flashlight up there. But, the cube is made mostly of acrylic, so perhaps I should have been more gentle trying to get through solves. Thankfully it was after the musical portion of the evening and while my drummer was packing up, because that meant only a couple of people saw the giant cube self-destruct. One of the spindle posts sheared off, and the entire layer of the cube that was being held in by that center piece tumbled to the cobblestone. Thankfully no small internal pieces went missing (except perhaps a nylon washer).

Today, I'm working on reassembly, so I thought it might be fun to show off the inside because I don't plan to have it apart often.

Here's the post that I had to cement back on. You can see a little of the the circuit board inside where the LED's that light up the interior of the cube are.

Here's the non-WCA compliant logo on one of the corners.

And here are the sub-parts of the center piece.

When the post finishes drying in a couple of hours, I can slide the lower part of the center on, re-seat the spring, lube and install the swivel ring, screw the retaining screw back in, and snap the center cap back on. There's a chance it's going to shear apart again, but I may also have a different glue formulation available if for some reason this one doesn't work out. I may also have to add a plastic washer

On another personal cubing note, I improved my best time on 6x6x6 by an entire minute, but going from 11:36.24 to 10:33.54 doesn't seem like much when the record time for a 6x6x6 is 1:20.03 (Feliks Zemdegs, AUS) and USA's own Max Park is closing in on him, having beaten Kevin Hays' best single by almost 5 seconds to take the #2 spot.

Here's Max's recent WR average that includes a 1:21.31 single.



POSTSCRIPT: Sometime while this was going up, Max Park broke the 6x6x6 single record.

A leap forward... twice!

This last Friday, the 27th, was the release date for the new Nintendo game Super Mario:Odyssey. I was already excited about because it looked like that it had taken some of the best parts of several of the previous 3D Mario games, and then added an ability to hijack the other enemies with a smart control scheme to it to push it forward into the Switch.

Cappy is a a resident of the Cap Kingdom, a strange hat-themed place. At the beginning of the game, Mario is knocked off of Bowser's ship into the Cap Kingdom, and loses his hat at the same time. Luckily, Cappy happened to be nearby and found what was left of Mario's hat and returned it to him, with Cappy inhabiting the hat to give it some abilities that Mario wouldn't normally have. Since Cappy's Cap Kingdom was being attacked by Bowser, it seemed that Cappy and Mario would do well to team up to defeat the common enemy.




 Here's the commercial that they've been playing. Surprisingly, this song is part of an amazing set piece in the middle of the game that I will try not to spoil - but here's a hint: The woman singing is a representation of a character from the Mario universe, and no she's not Princess Peach. My older son, knowing what was coming up, had the good sense to make me quit what I was doing so I could see it for myself. If you're prone to fits of nostalgia about Mario, this will trigger most of them.

If you really liked 64, Sunshine, Galaxy, or 3D world, you're going to love this game. Also, dig around and see if you have some amiibo around, you might need them.

(As of this writing, our play tester has over 200 moons out of 999 and we've seen the regular ending.)


The second leap forward this weekend happened at ChicaGhosts 2017 on Saturday.

After Patrick Ponce took the 3x3x3 single record from Feliks Zemdegs back in September, I figured that it would be a while before we saw a new record, since unlike the improvement from Matts Valk 4.74 since to Feliks' 4.73, Patrick's time was a 4.69. However, on Saturday, we got this.





SeungBeom Cho took the new single record with a 4.59 - even more of an improvement than the last new record, and even sooner. This was somewhat unexpected as his previous fastest solve in competition was a 6.54.

 Reconstruction (posted both on this video and on r/cubers by Stewy_ )
 Scramble: U2 L' D2 L D2 R F2 D2 R' D2 U2 B U L U L' R D L2 F2 U2 R'

 x2 // inspection
D' R' L2' U' F U' F' (D' U') U' R' // xxcross
y' R' U' R // 3rd pair
y' R U' R' U' R U R' // 4th pair
U' R' U' F' U F R // OLL(CP)
U' // AUF

So from looking at this solve, the major things that happened here is that for taking an extra couple of moves in planning out the first four pieces, he picked up two additional corner-edge pairs. Also, the OLL algorithm happened to also correctly permute the pieces. Good planning at the beginning, a lucky skip at the end.

Cubes and Lawyers don't mix.

So there have been a few odd developments in the legal side of cubing of late. The original legal history of the Rubik's cube was a bit mixed-up and checkered, but most of that was over by 1980.

Back in 2012, Rubik's tried to block DaYan (one of the first companies making improved 3x3x3 cubes) from exporting cubes and there were a few instances of cubes being destroyed at customs, and DaYan experimented with using an alternate color scheme or unassembled kits as workarounds, but for whatever reason this was short-lived and DaYan was back selling regular cubes by late 2013.

There was also some issues in the EU with Simba Toys of Germany, where Simba felt that the function of the puzzle should only be a patent and not a trademark, where Simba went through a 10-year legal battle with Seven Towns, the company in charge of administrating the Rubik's IP. I have seen differing accounts of the winner of the legal battle, but only because Rubik's likes to talk about the EUIPO  decision, (European Union Intellectual Property Office) and that was later overturned by the ECJ (European Court of Justice).

The two new problems are a little closer to home for Americans.

The first of two recent problems is that Rubik's brand is suing Duncan Toys and Toys 'R' Us. This is about trademark, and not the patent.

I had always assumed that the reason Target and Walmart never sold other brands of cubes is that they had a distribution deal with Hasbro and/or Seven Towns to sell real Rubik's cubes and didn't (and weren't going to) have a deal with the other manufacturers. In the last few years, the only other cube-like puzzles that I've seen in the big box stores have been the toys made by Meffert's, like the  Skewb Extreme, The Molecube, and the Gear Ball and Gear Cube puzzles.

However, I was not entirely surprised at Duncan's recent entrance into retail cubing. (You should know Duncan from their excellent Yo-Yo products.) The Quick Cube wasn't released until just a few years ago, and well after the expiration of Rubik's patent. (Applied for in 1975, granted in 1977, it should have expired in 2002.) Unlike DaYan or Simba Toys, Duncan already has a great grasp on the toy store market in the US.

I really like the Duncan Quick Cube, because at $5 it's an easily obtainable starter cube, and it's a much faster cube right out of the box than a Rubik's brand cube is. With a little bit of silicone lubricant, it's an even better cube, and I actually bought a handful of Duncan cubes for other people in an effort to start them off cubing with something decent. With a Rubik's brand cube, especially now with the tiled redesigned model out, it's not exactly a comfortable cube for beginners. More emphasis was placed on making a Rubik's brand cube not able to be tampered with or disassembled and a lot less emphasis was placed on smooth turning, so I couldn't recommend it. If you really want a Rubik's brand cube that works well, it takes months of breaking in for it to have a chance to be comfortable, and some of them get really loose and catchy by then. On the other hand, if you're the sort of person that thinks you're going to turn the cube so hard that it's going to pop apart and you feel compelled to eat one of the pieces but might accidentally choke on it, then by all means stick to the Rubik's brand cube.

The other lawsuit is that Rubik's brand is suing TheCubicle, an online speedcubing retailer. It's disappointing, while not entirely surprising. Since TheCubicle does some assembly and customization and is inside the borders of the US, it makes them appear to some as an infringing manufacturer and not just an import company.

I would have to imagine that nobody that buys from TheCubicle is trying to get a Rubik's brand cube, and anybody that even knows about TheCubicle is well aware of the difference between a Rubik's brand cube and other brands of cubes. Sadly, all suing TheCubicle seems to be doing is driving a wedge between speedcubing hobbyists and the Rubik's brand.  I find this rather sad because speedcubers are what have helped keep the Rubik's cube one of the most popular toys of all time for this long. We have long been emissaries for cubing, when all Rubik's has done in the same time period was make the same product with very little improvement and no effort to make a premium product for speedcubers. They're still using the same design for their 4x4x4 cubes that they were using in 1982 that still has the same design flaw it's always had while other companies have made vast improvements in the mechanism. Their current 2x2x2 is better than their 80's 2x2x2 only because that was such an exceedingly low bar to clear, and many could argue that the new 3x3x3 is actually worse for speedcubers as it allows no corner cutting whatsoever and is too variable in quality right out of the package.

I can understand Rubik's desire to protect their trademark, but as their patent has expired it should have been logical for them to expect to face some competition in the marketplace. While I don't know how much these lawsuits have cost them, I have to think that they could have fostered more good will and maintained more sales by designing better cubes - both for beginners and for the speedcubing crowd. It would have again given them some measure of patent protection, and cubers wouldn't be in the awkward position of not being able to recommend the product of the original designer.

Since one of you was going to ask eventually...

What's the deal with this guy? (Link to the left is WorldStarHipHop, where I found the best quality version so far, embed below is from YouTube so that Blogger won't yell about looking at http content over https.)

First look might make you think that you're watching an impressive one-handed solve, but further inspection would indicate that it's either a repeating pattern that just goes back to solved, or the video picks him up well into a solve.

In every still frame I can make sense out of, all the corners seem to be done, or at worst two opposite layers of solved corners are 90 degrees apart from each other. In addition, when you get a glimpse of a face with four solved corners, the edges across the center from each other are both the same color. This would indicate a cube where only slice moves had been done, typically, but there are other scenarios where doing (UD) or (LR) or (FB) together repeatedly might cause the same thing.

If a reconstruction gets done, either by one of the pros on /r/Cubing or eventually by me, I will post an update.

This is where the "rambling" part of my blog title comes from.

So, at some point I thought I was going to go to Cubing Knights 2017, but then I waited several weeks before I signed up because 1) I wanted to make sure no schedule conflicts arose and 2) I thought that I needed better cubes.  No schedule conflict ever arose, but the competition was full before I could sign up. Honestly, that's kind of fantastic - It's nice to know that a cube competition is still a viable thing and people still want to do that.  Meanwhile I got better cubes, I finally shoot some video of them and I talk to the camera for over three minutes and have everything framed slightly off-center.  This is the "rambling" part that I always worry about.

I thought about also including a solve or two, but the running time was already too long. Maybe I will have to try those separately.

Records are made to be broken, Part 2.

The World Rubik's Cube Championship (July 13-16) only had a couple of records broken, but sported a major upset. Complete results are here.

For the records, the new record average for 3x3x3 One Handed was taken by Max Park at 10.31 seconds. His times were (12.71), (9.76), 9.77, 10.15, 11.01. The times in parentheses are the high and low times that get removed, the remaining three times are averaged. This beats his own record by 0.28 seconds, and keeps him faster than Feliks Zemdegs' best average by 0.39 seconds. Feliks still has the WR single at 6.88 seconds.

The other record broken was the average for Pyraminx, with Drew Brads beating his own record by .1 seconds, taking his already amazing 2.14 average down to 2.04 seconds. His times were (1.52), 1.70, 2.26, (3.21), and 2.17.

Drew already knew where he'd have to be to beat his own record, so naturally he was rather excited on that last solve.

As far as the major upset goes, this was the first time that Felixs did not make the podium in 3x3x3. It's not like he did horrible, 4th place is still not too shabby. It's still 5 times as fast as I regularly go. What I suspect is starting to happen is that cube times are starting to get low enough that we're going to see more of who's the best on any given day, as opposed to dominance by whoever is in the best overall shape and is solving the most efficiently with the best hardware. That's not to say that there isn't still room for improvement, but more people are able to get to that level than there used to be.

I was hoping to get out to another cube event soon myself, but I was too slow on signing up for a rather popular event, so it may be a while before I compete again. I'm not concerned, it will give me more time to practice.

GIANT EDIT: It would appear that thanks to either lack of sleep or focus, I skipped the part where Felix Zemdegs got new WR's in early rounds that weren't the final with:

5x5x5 Single 38.52 WR Average 46.24 WR (53.69) 50.99 (38.52) 43.25 44.48 (SECOND ROUND)
6x6x6 Single 1:20.03 WR Average 1:27.79 WR 1:28.00 1.35.33 1.20.03 (FIRST ROUND)
7x7x7 Single 2:06.73 WR Average 2:15.07 WR 2:06.73 2:24.32 2:14.15 (FIRST ROUND)

For puzzles larger than 5x5x5, you get three attempts only and none are thrown out.

Word is, Feliks has been doing a lot better on 5x5x5 and 6x6x6 since getting some magnetic versions of those puzzles from Speedcubeshop.

Records are made to be broken.

While I have some stuff to talk about for cubing for myself, I thought that since there had been so much excitement around the record times in the last two months that I should mention some of it.

Sebastian Weyer had recently posted the first official sub-20 4x4x4 solve (19.41 seconds) at Berlin Summer Cube Days 2017 June 10-11, after Felixs had held the single record of 21.54 for 4x4x4 since 2015.

Sebastian has always been very competitive in this event, and is currently second in the world now - because Felixs had to take back the single record on June 22 in Arequipa, Peru at their Latin America Cubing tour event.

At the moment, Sebastian Weyer still holds the average record of 23.03 for 4x4x4, a full second and a half faster than Feliks' best average of 24.57

I had mentioned that at the end of April, that Max Park had overtaken Feliks Zemdegs' long-standing Ao5 3x3x3 cube record. Feliks traveled to Chía, Colombia for the Chía 2017 on June 28 and 29, another part of the Latin America Cubing tour. This was a very large competition with over 200 competitors in the 3x3x3 division. Most of them were from Colombia, but a handful were from nearby countries (Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador) and another handful were from not so nearby countries (Australia, New Zealand, USA, and Canada).

In the first round, Feliks posted an average of 5.97 seconds, substantially below the previous record of 6.39 seconds.





Feliks had actually done better than this at home practicing but had not as yet managed to get a time as good as that at a competition.

At the Chía event, Feliks also bested his world record single on 5x5x5 to bring it down to 41.24 seconds.

Feliks has completely dominated 5x5x5 since 2010, having had the record nearly the entire time since 2010, with only a small gap between April and September 2012 when Yu Nakajima of Japan and Kristopher De Asis of Canada breifly held the record for the single. In the same time period, Feliks has held the average record the entire time.

So, now that Feliks has taken those back - of the 33 current official WCA records, Feliks holds 9 of them.

Note - I typed this a few days ago, and this could change by the time you read it because today is the second day of the US Nationals taking place in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Another odd cube, and some science.

The other thing that I got last month for my birthday that was cube-related was a Rubik's cube decorated like the Hellraiser puzzle box.

While I had the tripod set up, I also did a quick science experiment. When the new plastic tile Rubik's cubes came out a couple of years ago, one of them became my permanent beach cube. Within a couple of days of getting it, I was at an all-day beach event that meant a lot of sunscreen application would be required. A few seconds after putting sunscreen on my hands the first time, I grabbed my beach cube and wiped my thumb across the logo, which removed most of the logo with minimal effort. I lost that cube the other weekend, and got a new one, and had to know if the new logo was going to be removed by sunscreen like the old one had. Here's a picture of the two logos that you're likely to find on a Rubik's brand cube made after 2013. The logo on the left was the first one to be released.

The old one had a logo like the cube on the left, my new beach cube has a logo like the one on the right. You can see that the logo on the cube on the left is already beat up a bit, even without complicated chemical agents. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I just let the camera roll anyway - it's not really science if you already think you know how it's going to turn out.

It's about time I got a new timer.

This was one of the two birthday things that I got this year that were cube-related. I had gone so long without a stackmat, that I think that anything that I had ever learned faded away by the time I actually made it to a competition. I was also thinking that I hadn't shot anything cube-related on my youtube channel in a while. In an effort to present the basics for someone that is just curious or hasn't competed before and needs to learn something, here's the Speed Stacks StackMat timer, Generation 4.

Cubing in public, and a super cuber in California.

My kids, my wife, my beach cube and I all went to the Deerfield Beach Surfers for Autism event a couple of days ago and we had a fair amount of fun, even though I only did maybe one in-depth cube demonstration for one of the vendors and only one waiting in line with participants. The most important things I learned were:

• If you have an extra Coke, share it.
• If the surf is rough, paddle harder.
• I really like chimichurri on french fries.

I have been doing cube demonstrations fairly often, probably a couple a week, just waiting in line at the grocery store or getting lunch. I did one today at a local sandwich place, where they wanted to see a full-on speedsolve while my sandwich contents were cooking, and I didn't bother with my usual round of explanations. Another patron filmed it, however I'm guessing that I won't see it despite my attempts because I'm always too flustered to say "No Spaces!" when I tell people that my youtube channel is SuperMonkeyCube. If you do a search for "super monkey cube" on youtube all you get is silly Super Monkey Ball results. I was even more psyched than usual because the person at the sandwich place that helped me and wanted to see the speedsolve was so jazzed to show me a prism that they carry around with them in order to demonstrate light dispersion when you look through two sides of it, creating funky rainbow effects. Since at heart, I'm just a person that's super-excited about their hobby, it warms my heart to see other science and math enthusiasts do their thing.

The other day at Publix I did my usual round of demonstrations, only to have a woman tell me "You should put this on Youtube." The one thing that I really want to have on Youtube that I really don't have on Youtube is exactly that thing. I want to have a person casually ask me about the cube, we have a little back-and-forth conversation about what their understanding is and I try to clear up their misconceptions, and I demonstrate what they want demonstrated, and do a solve or two to show them what they want to see. The problem for me is that I can't do that while filming it myself, and adding a cameraperson will likely ruin the spontaneity of the whole thing unless I'm constantly followed by a hidden camera crew (which I'm guessing might run me into trouble with the sorts of retail establishments that these interchanges normally take place in). However, maybe if I let it be known that I'd like a camera operator or two and a demonstration victim shemp fake shemp lovely assistant whatever you call the person you're doing the demonstration for, maybe I will be able to round up some volunteers.

Having had a birthday recently, I got a couple of cube-related things, but those will have to wait until another post. Another bit of cube news is too timely, and takes precedence.

Max Park - shown here at the OCSEF Open 2017 in Costa Mesa,CA - breaks the world record average by .06 seconds. Prior to this event, Max was ranked 6th in the world for average time at 6.92 seconds, with a personal best of 5.92 ranking him at 29th in the world for single solve. Also, prior to this event, Feliks Zemdegs held the Ao5 average record for the previous seven years.

If you check out the analysis by BrestCubing on reddit, you can see that Max doesn't really solve like Feliks does.

Feliks tends towards a variety of a lot of very advanced techniques - XCross (eXtended Cross - solving one or more of the four corner-edge pairs while solving the first four edge pieces that are typically referred to as the Cross.) ZBLL (Zborowski-Bruchem Last Layer which has algorithms for all possible last layer cases where the edges are already oriented) and some other freestyle block-building methods borrowed from the Roux and Petrus methods. This means that Feliks is trying to optimize what he's doing for many different kinds of initial positions and find something that's the most turn-efficient for what he sees. Felix's best competition solve of 4.73 seconds was only 43 moves.

When you review Max's solves, what you see is that the only solve where he tries to do something fancy (solve 2 where he does a partial cross before bringing in the first corner edge pair) is his slowest solve (7.26 sec) and second highest move count (68). His other solves are very straightforward, and just plain fast. Max's fastest solve, a competition best for him, was a 5.60 with 62 moves - just over 11 turns per second.

This does make me wonder about the number of algorithms that someone can have memorized and be able to execute them solidly. It's not necessarily worthwhile to have a multitude of algorithms under your belt if a few of them are going to be a little slower than the other ones, and the more different things you have algorithms for mean more cases that you have to be able to recognize. One of the reasons that there are more CFOP solvers than other methods is because it's less abstract to explain and easier to identify cases.

Well, maybe I'm going to have to practice with a metronome more. (Bass and cubing.)

"What's the secret?" they ask...

...and more often than not, I respond with "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"

It's not a question that I get all the time, but if I'm out walking around with my Rubik's cube and a bystander asks me that question, it's the question that's the most likely to get me to stop.

I think the most common misconception about the Rubik's Cube is that people think there's more going on that what there is. Visually, there are 54 stickers (or colored tiles). It usually takes me showing a person specifically what an edge and what a corner is to get them to realize what they're looking at. More or less, this is the rundown that I give them.

Ok, so the first thing that you want to see is that the center pieces don't move relative to each other. On this cube, red is always opposite orange, white is always opposite yellow, and blue is always opposite green. These six pieces are on a center spindle like a U-Joint in your car, and can't go anywhere. The next thing is that you want to notice is that each edge piece and each corner piece is unique. For example there's only one orange and white piece, and there's a one-to-one correspondence between the colors on the piece and where it has to go when the cube is solved.

At this point I would turn the cube so that the orange and white piece is in the right place.

When I was using older cubes, I often took one of the edge pieces out at this point to show that you can't really change the pieces and that it really was a matter of getting the selected piece in the right place.


So now, you can see that the place that the orange and white piece has to go is that spot between the orange center and the white center. That piece goes at the intersection of those two faces.

While I turn the cube to show the position of the piece, I'm looking for one of the two adjacent corner pieces.


Here's the corner piece that goes next to it. Orange, white, and green. 

That piece has to go at the corner that corresponds to the orange, white, and green centers. There are twelve edge pieces with two colors each, and eight corner pieces with three colors each. So now, for every piece on the cube, you can say: Is the piece in the right place, and is it turned around the right way?

If I think that I've lost them, I pick a different piece and place it in an incorrect orientation in the correct location, and if I haven't lost them I try to extrapolate a little more.

So this now means that if you do one side, like most people try to figure out first, it's not going to just be that side. If you have one side done correctly, it's going to be an entire layer solved.

From here it's usually dependent on the person and how we're doing and what follow-up questions that they're asking.

Another nice version of this interchange is that every once in a while (and it's becoming more frequent) I get to watch someone else solve a cube, and I'm able to offer some pointers, or recommend what to work on next or what to look up. The majority of the time is still me trying to demonstrate and explain as much as is requested to people that are unfamiliar.

Sometimes it's hard to know when we're done, but sometimes it's really easy. Once in a while after a solve demonstration, especially since I'm not as fast as whatever they may have seen on the internet or TV, they say things like "Did you see that there are some kids that can do it really fast, but they're doing it mathematically?" The last time that someone did that, I just walked off.

Had you seen it yourself, you might have thought that I assumed that it was the two people talking to each other and I was no longer in the conversation, since I didn't have a polite response prepared. And then you go - Hey, wait a minute, isn't there math here? What's your problem with the question? So, maybe I should explain.

1) Practically nobody successfully solves a cube without a plan. Even if you don't start with a plan, you're going to need one by the time you finish.

2) Nobody solves a cube fast without a plan, and having memorized algorithms beforehand and putting time into executing those algorithms as efficiently as possible.

3) Nobody solves a cube really fast without a plan, memorized algorithms, and lots of practice at piece tracking - looking ahead at finding the pieces you're going to need for the next algorithm by the time you finish the one you're doing.

So the question you have to ask yourself, is that math? I would say that it's just pattern recognition and execution of specific operators that have some basis in set theory or group theory, but you're not doing any set theory while you're solving the cube (unless you're working it out slowly from scratch like case #1 above.) Considering how infrequently set theory and group theory come up in casual conversation, I don't even have a good feel for what people would say is or is not math. Perhaps that can be left as an exercise for the reader to determine what is, or is not math here. (I'm not suggesting that set or group theory isn't math, I'm suggesting that those are the sort of things about which a layperson might be inclined to say, "No, I mean like real math.")

It would also appear that I really need to watch that movie about Edward Snowden. I was disappointed to find out he doesn't have a WCA ID.

A brief disruption, and a small explanation.

The other morning I went to the beach to walk for a few miles, as per usual, with the minimum accompaniment of my wife, our dog, and my Rubik’s brand cube that only goes to the beach. It’s a newer cube (2013 or later) with plastic tiles and the newer mechanism. This particular cube is rather loose as a fair amount of sand has gotten in it over the past couple of years and worn away at the plastic. Periodically I rinse the cube out, and then re-lubricate it, and it’s OK again.

We meet a lot of people at the beach. Most of them are tourists, but I suppose that there are a fair number of locals. Every once in a while I get to talk to people about the cube, but usually I have to already be stopped by dog socialization or people who need to ask my wife about some dog-related thing. This particular morning I got an unusual request – a kid, I can only assume that he's 10 or so - asked me if he could attempt to solve it. Since I run into other solvers so infrequently, I immediately hand the kid the cube, waiting to see what his ability level is. Disappointingly, he immediately grabbed a corner piece and twisted it in place, which resulted in me asking for the cube back a second later. I untwisted the corner, and ran through a rather clumsy corners-first solve while he watched. When I was down to three pieces left to solve, he asked me if I was still attempting to solve it, and seemed genuinely surprised four moves later (R2 E R2 E’) when I was done.

Our little interchange over, I felt bad as I walked off. Certainly, I could have let him keep going. It’s not like twisting one corner was going to make a big difference in a solution being attempted by a person that decides that twisting a corner is a viable move. Unfortunately, it struck me as a rather familiar scenario – when some people are presented with something complex they may not understand, often disruptive behavior can help them make breakthroughs when a more conventional strategy seems hopeless and time-consuming or analysis seems unnecessary or unwanted. Many a Street Fighter match or a football game has been won by a hare-brained strategy that a reasonable opponent wouldn’t even think to defend against. Our very history as a country in America has been defined, and is still being defined in new ways, by disruptive behavior.

On a small closed group, however, every unconventional disruption has to be undone for the group to return to its natural order. Had the kid managed to get closer to solving the cube, that single corner twist that he did would have to have been reversed at some point in the process. I don't know if he felt like I forced convention on him, or if he even understood the implication of what he did at all. At that moment, I felt like I had to show him that there was a right way, and it didn't take shortcuts. Unfortunately (whether for me or for him will be left as an exercise for the reader) I only could show him by solving the cube, instead of offering up some sort of explanation.

 

For a moment, let's imagine a rather simple cube. Since we're only concerned about the corner pieces for the purpose of this thought experiment, let's imagine a 2x2x2 cube that only has stickers on the U and D layers. When we talk about orientation, we will say that if it's correct - we'll assign a numerical value of 0 to that. If it's counterclockwise from the correct position, we'll call that -1/3, and if it's clockwise from the correct position, we'll call that 1/3.  If you turn the U or the D layer, no change in orientation has occurred. If you turn F, B, L, or R 90 degrees, what happens is that you get two of the pieces changed by -1/3, and two of the pieces changed by 1/3. Add the numerical values of each piece up and you get 0.

That's not to say that you always get 0 - if you started from the solved state and did the move R' D R you will have three pieces with an orientation of -1/3 and all of the rest of them correct. Add those up and you get -1. If you had done R' D' R you get three pieces with orientation 1/3 which add up to 1. As it turns out, no matter how many moves you do, it will always add up to an integer. 

This lends itself to a basic of cube behavior. Normally when I explain it, I would tell people that a single corner cannot be out of orientation by itself. They can be in opposite pairs (1/3 and -1/3) or all three in the same direction, like in our R' D R example.

If you study the edge pieces on a 3x3x3 in the same way, you discover that edges cannot be individually out of orientation for a similar reason, and you will only find an even number of edges can be out of orientation. If you try the thought experiment for edges out fully, remember an incorrectly oriented edge would have a numerical value of 1/2, since an edge only has two possible positions.

Luckily it is rather difficult to disrupt the orientation of an edge cube by hand due to the way it sits in the mechanism, but it is a concern if someone were to reassemble a cube at random. There is also a possible problem with the parity of the pieces if a 3x3x3 cube is reassembled at random, where you could possibly get to the end of the cube and only have two pieces out of place, which is also not normally possible. You can have a minimum of three pieces out of place, like three corners or three edges, or you can have two corners and two edges for a total of four pieces out of place, but no less.

At a certain point, the only solution for disruption is disassembly and careful reassembly. 

(Don't even get me started on what to do with an older cube whose stickers have been moved around.)

Merry Cubemas!

Information is symmetrically asymmetrical.

Recently where I worked, we had the thumb turn fall off of a relatively new door lock. (The thumb turn is the part on the inside of the door so you can lock a deadbolt from inside without the key.) My first thought was that since it just unthreaded it shouldn't be that hard for me to thread it back in, but it turned out to not be obvious. I was able to get it threaded back in, but I couldn't get the lock mechanism to do what it was supposed to. I felt like that I could have done it given enough time, but it wasn't the sort of thing that I could spent more than ten minutes on without feeling like I had something more important to do.

Later, after we had finished with customers for the day, one of the technicians that work for our locksmith came by to fix the door. He met me at my desk at the counter, noting that I have a few Rubik's cubes there to harass customers with. I assume that he's around my age, since he identified the cubes readily, although he was a little surprised at how shiny the new plastic tile cubes are. We headed over to the offending door, and I handed him a plastic bin with all of the carefully sorted thumb turn pieces. It took him relatively little time to correctly line up all of the pieces of the lock and get it back together. Even though I really tried to watch him, whatever he did was so natural and effortless I didn't really see what he did that was different from what I had done. I tried to ask him what he did differently, but he wasn't able to explain it. While he was looking at the rest of the door to see what might have caused the thumb turn mechanism to come loose, he says "Did you see that thing..." and I stupidly assume he's going to ask "Did you see that thing on America's Got Talent with that guy that does magic tricks with a Rubik's Cube?"

He tells me no, finishes the piece he was screwing back in, and then says "Did you see that thing where a middle school kid took apart a Rubik's Cube and figured out the mathematical formula for it and the Rubik's cube company paid him a whole lot of money to keep it a secret?"

There was an awkward silence while I tried to regain my composure. Meanwhile he found one of the holes at the top of the door where the top bolt was rubbing in a way that it wasn't supposed to and reamed it back out so that the door could lock more smoothly. While he was doing that, my internal dialogue was going full blast.

What was so bad about that? He's just asking a question. Did you see that or not?  Were you listening to the question? Disassembly doesn't inform you about the cube's regular solution, using the phrase "mathematical formula" in this context is nearly meaningless, and the notion of a conspiracy to keep the solution of the world's largest selling and probably most pirated toy a secret is laughable since most of the cubes sold in the last 20 years come with a solution pamphlet right in the package and you can get a solution method from the company's own website.  How would he know? He's busy doing actual work.

When I returned to reality, I explained about how that there had been cube competitions since the 80's, and no conspiracy like that existed that I was aware of. He came back to my desk to write up the bill for his office, and I grabbed a mostly unsolved cube, finished it, and then showed him how a short sequence of moves can move a small predetermined number of cubes around. My go-to routines for this are usually R2 U' S' U2 S U' R2 that moves three U layer edges around, and R' D' R D' R' D2 R D2 that twists some D layer corners and moves some D layer edges around.  The reason for those two particular moves is that I know their inverses as well as the regular moves. I also showed him what happens with the cube mechanism itself, about how better cubes are better able to realign when one face is turned before another face is completely aligned. I thought this concept might appeal to the part of his brain where all of his locksmith information already resided. While he seemed receptive to the idea since I was able to easily show him what I was talking about, I didn't feel sure that I had dissuaded him of his original notion despite being able to solve a cube in front of him. At that point I grabbed my boss since the bill was ready to be signed off and he was done and we said our goodbyes.

The first time that I ran across this sort of thinking was my stepfather, when he rambled on one day at lunch about how the car companies had colluded with the oil companies to keep high MPG engines out of production. This theory didn't really hold any water with me at the time, since my father is a mechanical engineer and was very involved with engine design and I had at least some sense of the math involved. (You can find a much better version of the math here.) But, if you're a person that's sure there's a conspiracy, and there's no obvious way to falsify your hypothesis, and you don't understand the problems of making regular gasoline do what it does, then the thought remains unchecked.

At least for our Rubik's cube conspiracy, I was able to easily falsify part of the hypothesis - I was able to show that it can be solved. (I was going to say that it could be solved by a normal person, but many of you reading this will want to refute this non-trivial assertion.) That might not be enough to prove to the locksmith that there never was a conspiracy, so perhaps that thought will still remain as well.

I wasn't surprised about the idea that people exist that have never seen a Rubik's cube solved in person. I carry a cube around with me every day, and I'm always going to meet someone every once in a while that hasn't seen a cube solved.  What I was surprised about was the harboring of the idea that there was a conspiracy to keep the solution a secret, and what believing in a thing like that does to a person's trust in humanity itself. I can't place the same amount of importance on the solution to the Rubik's Cube, or the details of a magical carburetor that doesn't actually exist, or the nature of how to unlock something that's supposed to stay locked.

I was left with the feeling that maybe me showing people a Rubik's Cube can be solved is more important than I thought. Not just for the thing itself, but to show people the idea that even learning something (anything?) complicated is just part of a process that we go through gradually and that through reflection and observation we refine our abilities. Luckily, this morning in traffic I solved a cube at a stoplight and the person next to us rolled down their window to tell me that it was amazing to watch and that they've been working on cubing for a month and that they were learning. It restored my faith in people again.

Oh, yeah. I was left with a second feeling - if I want to be able to put locks back together I need more practice.

Cubing Tips Part 3 - I'm still talking about practice.

I really wanted to wax philosophical about practice, but I think it's more important to nail down some specific things that will help people practice speedcubing more effectively. This will mostly be aimed at CFOP solvers, but I will try to add comments for Roux.

1) Slow, untimed solves. This is effective regardless of the method used. Work on consistency of steps, looking ahead, not turning the whole cube very much, and turning smoothly. If you wanted to take this idea to the next step, then start solving with a metronome dictating your speed, and then gradually increasing the speed while maintaining smoothness.

2) Work on your first four edges as an automatic reaction to what you see during inspection. Lots of random scrambles done slowly may start to get you familiar with what you have to do to keep your movecount down and cube turns to a minimum. Not everybody is going to start color neutral, so maybe at first you're just going to look at your target center and the four edge pieces that go with it for a lot of scrambles and see what the easiest way there is. However, some of them are not intuitive at first, and you might gain that knowledge by watching some machine solved cases. One of the extra features of the Android app Twisty Timer is that when it generates a scramble for 3x3x3, you can press the "Hint" button and it offers optimal solves for the first four edges for any of the six colors. Once you think that you can formulate a good plan, the next thing to do is to figure out if you can execute the plan without having to look at those pieces, because you need to start looking for what's next - the first corner/edge pair. For Roux solvers, apply this to the first block, and start looking for the second block.

3) As you execute the moves for each corner/edge pair to build the F2L, you need to locate the next pair of pieces for the next corner/edge pair. If you can see farther ahead than that, that's great. If you feel you're not doing something smoothly, look up a couple of different algorithms for that case and see what feels good. While the F2L should be done intuitively much like the first four pieces, it still may be helpful to learn some algorithms for the more difficult cases.  For Roux, the next step is the U layer corners, and is its own very difficult subset of algorithms, nearly as difficult as the last layer algorithms in CFOP, and probably will get accomplished using the main feature of item #4 below.

4)  For the last layer, my suggestion is drill, drill, drill.
Once you learn an algorithm, go on youtube and watch a couple of different people do the moves to look at move groupings and hand positions.
While the OLL is done before the PLL, and it might make sense to learn things in order, it's more important to learn the PLL first.  Early on you will only make use of only three or four of the OLL cases, having to use them in combination and even multiple times in some cases.

Once you feel like you have enough moves put together to finish the last layer, use the qqtimer subset feature to generate scrambles for the last layer.

For Roux, there is a different subset you can use that just scrambles the last six edges - it's labeled "Roux-generator ".

Don't forget, there's always more to practice (and not just at cubing).