Solving Rubik's Cube

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Introduction

When I was a young teenager in the early 1980s my family decided that for our summer vacation we would drive from our home near San Francisco, California to my grandparents' home near Grand Rapids, Michigan. As one means to keep all her children busy during the week-long drive, my mother presented each of us with a new toy that had recently become the latest international fad: a small multi-colored cube that appeared to be composed of 27 little sub-cubes that could be rotated and twisted into a maddening little jumble. This was one of my first experiences with a Rubik's Cube.

My younger siblings (I'm the oldest) soon tired of trying hopelessly to reassemble their cubes but I doggedly determined to solve this elegant but maddening puzzle. And by the time we rolled into my Grandparents' driveway I had it solved.

It's always been a source of pride for me that I was able to solve such a difficult puzzle without any outside aid. Of course, being stuck inside a van for a week with little else to do probably had something to do with it.

Now I'm a father myself and this year my sons have all discovered the Rubik's cube. Oh, they'd seen dad's cubes before but this Christmas marked the first time that any of them had actually desired to understand the puzzle themselves. As they have struggled with the cube and as I have worked to help them understand it I realized that it might be fun to put together these web pages.

I hope you enjoy them.

What's so special about this site?

There are a lot of web pages on the net that give Rubik's Cube solutions. But I think that this one is a bit different.

Most web pages on this subject tend to be very terse and focus on quickly describing a solution. In my opinion, most of them read like papers submitted to an engineering journal (or worse) and are far too technical and terse for my intended audience. Rather than just giving the solution, my goal is to encourage the reader to solve the puzzle on his or her own. I do give my solution, but only after gently leading up to it and providing some hints along the way. My descriptions are aimed at younger readers and I try and make things a little easier to understand than on most of the other web pages I've seen. I figure that if my kids can read this and understand it then I've done pretty well.

Also, I don't stop with the normal Rubik's Cube but I actually go farther and give the same treatment to the 5x5x5 cube (the Professor's Cube) and the 4x4x4 cube (Rubik's Revenge).

So let's get started!