You know that hair-tearing puzzle that "everyone" just can't seem to solve. It was such a craze back in the 80s, and I guess my family wasn't immune to its allure. Much like everyone else, as a kid I was just happy if I'd be able to complete one side of the cube, and then just stare at it and wonder, how the hell do I fix the rest of the sides?
Fast forward to the late 90s. One fateful summer day, during my college break, I happened to stumble across a book my family bought from a local department store (that's long since been shut down), that happened to show off a solution on how to solve the cube. Lucky for me, I'd also remembered where we kept the cube in the house. I fondly remembered that one afternoon, following the algorithms present in the book, and to my surprise I'd actually solve Rubik's for the very first time. I'd since called this basic method of solving the cube "The Hamburger Method", because it involved solving for the top and bottom layers of the cube, and then using a basic algorithm to solve for the edge pieces in the middle layer of the cube.
For a few years, I'd kept on solving the cube in this manner, realizing at some point how tedious it was to solve the cube this way. Too many moves were spent, but I will say one thing: It gave a better understanding on how to navigate pieces around the cube itself. It came to a point where I wanted to be quicker, so eventually I did my searches online in the early 00s. I'd searched for speedcubing methods and stumbled across the Lars Petrus method. It's a pretty intuitive method of solving a cube, on the foundation of building from a 2x2x2 cube and expanding from there. In a nutshell:
- You start at one corner of the cube, creating a 2x2x2 cube
- Expand that cube along one edge to then to create a 3x2x2 rectangle
- Using the free-moving layers, solve for the first 2 layers (F2L), leaving just one layer to fix
- Solve the final layer of the cube
I know, it seems a lot easier than it sounds. I think it took me a good month until I felt completely comfortable in memorizing all the algorithms for solving the last layer.
After my interest in the standard 3x3 waned, I had to expand my horizons. Now, I'm sure there are some people out there that have quite an expansive collection of cubes. Compared to those people, I consider my collection modest:
- a couple of 2x2 cubes, one of which uses tiles instead of stickers
- a number of 3x3 cubes: tiled, a Tic-Tac-Toe variant, a 25th and 30th Anniversary to name a few
- a 4x4
- a 5x5
- Mirror Cube: a 3x3 variant that is not equally split
- Square 1: Not an official Rubik's, but another cube puzzle with an odd cuts that also put the cube out of shape when mixed
- Void Cube: another 3x3 variant that's missing all the centers
To this day, I still try to play around with the standard 3x3 just so I'm not out of practice and I don't forget those algorithms. I should post up an updated video of me demonstrating the solve, but I guess for now, you can settle for an older, low quality video taken from my brother's phone easily a decade ago:
