So I bought a Rubik's Cube today... (1 Viewer)

[Adil M]

Pull the stickers off and make sure 2 of the center's match.

Then let the gambling begin .

 

[MarkHastings]

Have you seen the commercial where the blindfolded kid solves it in less than 30 seconds? For some reason, the colors look like they were digitally replaced to make it solve properly.

 

[Yee-Ming]

If anyone watched Beauty and the Geek, the Chinese engineering student was able to solve a Rubik's Cube blindfolded, after of course being allowed to study the scrambled cube before solving blind. I guess the real geniuses are able, from viewing it at the beginning, to figure out the entire sequence of moves necessary to solve it completely, unlike us putzes who did indeed memorise sequences from books (in my case, a mere leaflet, but it certainly works and I can still remember how to do it today, oddly) and need to review progress at each stage to figure out what's next.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

It's amazing the stuff we remember, I still know the code to getting the 30 extra men on Contra lol.

I'm starting to envy this Rubik guy, he probably made a freakin' mint off of our mental anguish.

 

[andrew markworthy]

I wouldn't be too hard on yourself, Yee-Ming. It's all a matter of how much practice you put in. The experts at this don't see the cube as you or I do. They have practised solving the puzzle so many times, that they see the situation as 'problem version 12' (or whatever) and produce the solution more or less without thinking. They don't have to work out the solution move by move - they can just act it out as a single unit of behaviour.

It's a permutation of a famous study on memory. If chess masters were briefly shown a position from a game in progress they could remember it more or less faultlessly. But if they were shown the same number of pieces at random positions on the board, their memory was no better than non-chess players'. In other words, it's all down to how much experience can lighten the memory load.

 

[PhillJones]

I had a rubiks cube as a kid and bought a how to solve it book for 99p from a jumble sale.

I got all the way to the last bottom corner pieces and there was a mistake in the book. For each step there is a left a right hand varient, depending on the orientation of the piece compared to where it needs to be. On the last step one of the sequences was wrong. I tried to figure it out based on the other chirality, which worked fine, but could not work out the mistake.

I was 12 at the time, imagine how pissed I was.

 

[TonyD]

rubiks cubes can be solved with the same moves for almost every pattern on the cube.
thats why people can solve it without looking.

but you do have to see were it is, to get started, what side to start turning from.

i have nt tried to do it in nearly 20 yars but it is very easy after you figure out the combination of moves.

a loose cube is easier for fast solving.