How are people able to solve a Rubix Cube in only a few seconds?
In: 813
You learn the the patterns it takes to solve and move pieces where they need to be.
Learn them until its muscle memory, so that instead of thinking about 8 moves to move a piece you remember it as one thing.
Now all you have to do is remember which pieces you need to move where, instead of each separate turn of every face to move them.
Then, when going for some real speed, you take those patterns that were in muscle memory except now you try to find faster and more efficient ways to do each pattern. Maybe spinning the bottom with your pinky instead of having to turn the whole thing to face you kind of thing.
Imagine you want to run with a ball to the goal. In your way ar people who want to take the ball from you. What are you doing? You look ahead of yourself to evade these people so they can’t take your ball. This “looking ahead” (seeing the next steps) is done at the same time as your running and dribbling (solving the cube).
If you do more and more of the same thing, they become more natural. Like walking: you can walk without thinking about it. They do it too, just with a cube.
Then there are tricks you can do with a ball. But there are also (Finger)tricks you can do with a cube.
Muscle memory. when you do specific movements with your muscles, those specific movements get trained and you get faster and do such movements without thinking
Patterns and Practice
I learned basically 3 moves and how to combo them together. At my fastest I solved a basic cube in 36 seconds. I thought I was fast because I was faster than my friends. Went to a competition and got smoked!
It’s kind of like this: you’re trying to get dressed as fast as you can so you put all your thought into finding clean undies, jeans, and a shirt, knowing you can throw on a random black hat, sneakers, and watch on your way out the door without thinking about it.
We only think far enough ahead to get us into familiar territory. Typically we inspect the cube to see what familiar mostly-solved condition we can get to in a competitive time at which point muscle memory hopefully takes over but the skill really is about identifying the closest mostly-solved configuration at the beginning.
They actually use magic powers and slow down time to solve the cube
Source: I can solve it in about 20 seconds
I feel alot of explanations on here are a bit misleading. I’m a speedcuber. My best time is 8.22 seconds. I’m not world class but I’m probably decent.
Basically the cube is solved (by most people) in 4 steps. Solving the cross (4 edge pieces), then the first 2 layers (solving 8 pieces around the cross), then the last layer through 2 steps, orienting the last layer pieces then permuting them. This is where I see most people get it wrong. The last 2 steps are done using algorithms. This is probably 1/3 of the solve. The whole solve is NOT algorithms, nor do speedcubers plan out the entire solve in their head beforehand. Even the most skilled speecubers can’t plan out that much, unless it’s an incredibly lucky scramble, which then maybe they can plan out 2/3 of the solve.
I usually plan out 5-10% of my solve in my “inspection time” (15 seconds before I solve where I’m allowed to look at the cube). The rest of the solve is figured out as I go through it. I’ve practiced enough to be able to do turns without looking or thinking about them too much, so I’m able to look at other pieces and plan ahead. This planning ahead is what I do for the entire solve, over and over. This is how speedcubers figure out what to do on the spot, without having many pauses. Tracking pieces while they move around the cube at extreme speeds and making split second decisions comes from practice. Then the last layer is performing the right algorithms fast. I probably average 6-7 turns per second throughout my solve but the fastest people average 10-12. So they’re able to solve it in 4-6 seconds instead of my 8-11 seconds.
So what you have to do is continuously practice learning off of memory so therefore you never forget and always get better.
It’s purely memory, that’s all.
There are several parts to it. While I can solve it in about a minute, my wife can do it in about 10 seconds, so I’ll try to compare:
While we both use the same rough process, she has shortcuts for every step. For example, while we both start solving the first 2 layers of the cube, I solve the bottom layer and then the middle, while she has the foresight and pattern recognition to solve both both at once. And then the top layer while I do the common beginner process of solving the center cross, then putting the corners in the right place, and then turning the corners the right way, she does that in 2 steps, first turning all the pieces the right way around and then putting them in the right place. The methods she uses has maybe half as many moves as what I do.
She’s also much better at keeping track of where pieces are in the 3d space. A huge amount of the time I take is spent searching for where pieces are and then searching where to put the pieces. Before solving, you spend a couple seconds looking at the cube to plan your solve. When I start moving the cube, I lose track of all the pieces except the one I’m focusing on, so then I need to spend a lot of time looking for the next piece. She can keep track of multiple pieces at once, and can keep track of those pieces as she moves the cube. While the limiting factor to my solve times is how fast I can figure out what to do, for her it’s how fast her fingers and her cube can move.
Finally the physical aspects: Rubik’s brand cubes are horrible. The cubes made for speed solving have several features, such as magnets that let you just flick a face of the cube and ensures it lands where you expect, or “corner cutting”, which means the layers don’t have to be perfectly lined up before you can turn another side of the cube. Even with the same cubes, my wife is a bit better because she has the feel for how hard she has to turn a side for it to land where she expects, while I have to follow the sides most of the way or I could miss. She also has better muscle memory, where I have to think more about what to move where.
The are not “Solving” the Rubik’s cube. In the 80’s, when the cube first came out, people genuinely tried to solve it. Then, some people figured out certain moves that you could do to move certain pieces around without disturbing what you’d already completed. Eventually a technique was created and is really an algorithm (instruction set) that people just memorized. So when you see a certain pattern, or need a certain move, you just use the moves that you pre-memorized.
I found a good website that teaches the methods. I learned it in 20 minutes, then taught it to my daughter and she had it figured out in the same amount of time;
Here’s the website;
[https://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/how-to-solve-the-rubiks-cube-beginners-method/](https://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/how-to-solve-the-rubiks-cube-beginners-method/)
So ELI5: people are not figuring out how to solve the cube, someone else already did that decades ago, people are just following the steps that other people figured out and it’s actually very easy. You just have to memorize a few moves and know when to use them.
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