I was born in ‘71, so right around the time I was becoming a teenager immersed in popular culture, that was when the cube started to get popular. I was a geek, so I got one, and several other hand held puzzles that were popular at the time, and the cube itself was the hardest of all the puzzles to master (there was a missing link puzzle that looked like a rectangle and had four sides, there was a pyramid made up of several triangles per side w/ 4 sides, there was this flat flip puzzle where you had to connect the rings, but these took relatively no time to figure out compared to the cube). But I had little to do, I lived 4 miles out of the nearest pissant town, and as I said, I was a geek, so it wasn’t like I had friends beating down my door to get me to come out and play. I had my Rubik’s cube, my boom box and my TI-99/4A computer, that’s what kept me occupied.
So, it didn’t take me long to figure out how to do one side, and then it started to occur to me that just because you have one side solved, doesn’t mean you have those 9 cubes (8 if you don’t count the middle because the middle doesn’t really move), in the proper places. If you DO have them properly placed, not only will you have a side solved, but the borders of the solved side will match the middle piece on each of the 4 bordering sides. Sure, I took the cube apart at first, to see what made it tick, but I kept trying, and eventually I realized that the puzzle was really not so much 6 sides as it was 8 3-sided corner pieces and 12 2-sided edge pieces. That just made it a whole lot less intimidating.
I had tried using a book called “The Simple Solution to Rubik’s Cube”, but I just really didn’t like how it brought this whole thing down to a mechanical process, simple steps to memorize…it took the fun out of it. And I realized that if I had hard and fast rules, I could move my hands pretty fast so I could probably solve it in half a minute if I memorized these steps. But I just didn’t want to do that…I wanted to figure it out on my own. So, after using the book to solve it once, I just forgot everything it had told me, and I realized that what I was going to do was basically start by getting all 8 corners in place. If you can imagine it, it looks like an X on all 6 sides. Then it was a matter of figuring out what moves I could and couldn’t make (i.e. if I moved the cube in certain ways, I would disturb the placement of the corner pieces, but if I restricted my moves to ones that wouldn’t disturb the corners, I could just work on the edges).
The next thing I figured out is if I looked at the cube and imagined a top side, a bottom side and four central sides going around….if I could solve those 4 edge pieces that basically circled around the middle of the cube (so imagine, top and bottom still look like an X, all 4 middles look like an H), all I had to do was work on the top, flip it to the bottom, and keep solving each side until my solving say the top somehow resulted in the bottom going back to a solved state if that makes any sense. Basically I got those two first parts (the corners and the middle) down to a fairly simple process, though there is still some trial and error to it, and it was just a matter of solve the top, solve the bottom, solve the top, and so on, flipping the cube over and over until I had it.
That’s how I solve it to this day. So, I don’t have hard and fast rules as to how to get the corners and I don’t have hard and fast rules as to how to get the top and bottom solved once you have it in that state, but I know basic moves that won’t disturb anything I already have solved, and from there it’s just a matter of either getting lucky, or getting the cube to a formation where I know that if I make moves x, y and z, I will get it to where I need to be (there are certain groupings I see when I’m doing the corners that I know exactly what moves to make from there to get to where I want to be, same with when I am solving the top and bottom, certain configurations and I know that a specified set of moves solves the whole thing). The center ring is generally simply a mater of locating where each of the 4 pieces is and doing what moves are necessary to move it to where I want it to be, not so much a process as I know how to get cube a to point b, regardless of where cube a and point b are, without disturbing the rest of the cube.
So, at the end of the day, my process isn’t consistent, but it requires me to put some thought into it each and every time I solve it. Some times I’ve gotten lucky, everything has fallen into place, and I’ve solve it in as little as 20 seconds. Some times it takes me 7 or 8 minutes. But no matter what, when I go to someone’s house and I see an unsolved cube, I leave them with a solved cube. It really is true that once you understand it, it’s really not that hard…but the trick is understanding the mechanics of it. Now I also have a 4×4 cube and a 5×5 cube, and I think when I was younger, I probably COULD have solved the 4×4 cube, I was really close, BUT, I had one and I took it apart to see what made it tick, and it was designed COMPLETELY differently, and I could never for the life of me get it back together. Eventually I lost some pieces and threw the whole thing out. Now I’m pushing 40 and I have no trouble remembering how to solve the 3×3 cube, but my brain seems to have lost its ability to figure out new complex things. I try to apply the same rules, and there are just too many variables….and back in the day when I had nothing but time on my hand I could have spent hours looking at what happens when I do this or that or the other thing and figuring out steps 1, 2, 3 and 4 and how to do step 2 without destroying what I did in step 1 and so on, but I just haven’t got the time, energy, curiousity or brain power to do that anymore. So, my 4×4 and 5×5 sit there mocking me, making me wish for a time machine.
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