How I tackled the unsolvable 4x4x4 Rubik’s Cube
Three months ago a kid from my family got a Rubik’s Cube for his birthday. I was there, and did not really pay attention. This is a stupid game, completely unsolvable, why would someone waste time on this? Stupid gift I thought, the kid will play with it five minutes and toss it in a drawer at home. I was far from imagining that three months later my own cube would follow me everywhere…
Back to the kid. He is trying to solve the cube but what is he looking at? A guide? What the actual f**k, there is a guide for those? I never got the memo! Anyway, I make my way to him and ask to have a look. Holy cow, almost 40 pages of drawing with endless combinations, even with the guide it looks impossible. What a stupid game.
Ok, don’t be stupid, let’s have a look anyway. I ask for the cube very nicely, and start following the guide. Not always clear, some part don’t seem documented, I endup in dead-ends, reshuffle, retry… An hour later, I am almost there, the cube almost complete. One last combination and voilà, the cube is complete. Oh yeah I am such a rock star.
I do it one more time, and then teach the kid to do it. His mother doesn’t believe he did it himself and asks me on the side. Oh yes, mother, he did, thanks to this Guide and an amazing teacher.
The day ends, we go home, the kid too, and the cube is gone. But it stays in my mind, patiently waiting in some empty dark room in my head waiting to be filled with hobbies (I don’t have any). After a few days, I must admit: I miss it for god’s sake! I need a cube to try again!
Like a reasonable adult, and not to look like a crazy person, I patiently wait for my birthday one month later to get one. But like a little crazy person, I go buy it myself with my wife, to make sure the guide is included. Yes it is.
My birthday arrives, it is on Valentines day. Pretty cool right? Meh maybe. I finally open the package. After a whole month waiting, I am finally able to play the cube again! It feels right in my hands, I feel like Frodo the Hobbit and its ring. I reach for the perfectly printed guide, but my mind freezes. Why are there two guides? Why does one guide says « How to solve a 4x4x4 cube » and the other says the same for a « 3x3x3 cube ». At that moment, I can’t believe I have been this stupid. You get it, don’t you? I bought a big cube, bigger that the original one. What a stupid mistake. I put the cube away, my decision is made: I will buy a real cube as soon as possible, I will never be able to do a big one.
That is when the « don’t be stupid » voice in my head comes back. « You are such a fool » it says, « you won’t even have a look at the guide, really? ». Flipping through the pages, I thought to myself: « Hmmm interesting, looks like solving a big cube is actually doing some preparation stuff, then solving a small cube within it, then closing up with some final moves ». Ok, let’s do this. And I start practicing a little each day.
After doing the moves several times, they start to be embedded in your fingers. You do them without thinking. Some of them are actually known only by my fingers, I am unable to explain them without a cube in hand.
When you look closely at the guide, you also start realizing interesting stuff. The guide gives complex shortcuts you can easily replace with a few more tricks, but easy ones. What if I rewrote my own guide, I thought, a simpler one, cleared from the useless moves? And what if I try to draw really simple schemas in black and white to replace the fancy drawings in colors?
The first version of my guide is still quite long but it’s a good start. I keep practicing and start noticing other stuffs. The moves described in the guide, which can look scary at first, could actually be seen from a different angle, a logical one.
Side note: moves in a cube are letters referring to the sides you have to move, ‘L’ for Left, ‘T’ for Top, ‘B’ for Bottom etc. I am using a french guide so I have ‘D’ for Droite (Right), ‘A’ for Avant (Front)… The letter ‘I’ means you need to move anti-clockwise.
If you take for example the moves
DI A DI PP D AI DI PP DD HI
and you are a little bit crazy like me you might notice that it actually says DAD PP DAD PP at the beginning. In french PP when pronounced means « grand dad ». If you look at the letter ‘I’, it is on the first and last part of the first DAD, and for the second DAD the first ‘I’ just moved to the right. For the end of the moves, you can just memorize it in some other way, or trust your sense of observation because at this point the cube is almost complete and you can guess the remaining moves. And because you don’t always find your dad and grandpa in the formula, you can also turn to the visual side of things, and memorize how the cube moves.
Sounds crazy? A little bit, probably, but it works. However the big cube is still pretty complicated, especially at the end when you have moves like d2 P2 H2 g H2 d’ H2 d H2 A2 d A2 g’ P2 d2. I don’t know you but I don’t see my dad or grand-dad in there! At this point, I felt like I would never be able to memorize everything and I decided it was time to go back to the small cube. After all I have been playing a more complex cube all along.
What a refreshing idea! In addition to being easier, the small cube is smaller (duh!) so easier to take everywhere, and way easier to manipulate. Game is on! Two months after starting practicing, I can solve a 3x3x3 cube in less than 2 minutes 30 seconds, entirely by memory, and also solve a 4x4x4 cube in about 5 minutes, with just the help of the guide at the end for three moves you could call « where the hell can I see my dad in there one day ».
When playing the cube, reactions are really funny. People don’t know there are guides (hello! everyone knows this!) and take you for some kind of crazy person. And when you tell them it helps you relax, they just think they should avoid you from now on. My wife, who was complaining about me being on my phone too often, does not seem very happy with my new hobby. She wants me to read books now! But I can’t hack my way into books, can I?
What I thought to be impossible two months ago ends up being fairly easy after a while. From now on, the goal is to apply this kind of experience to any challenge in my every day life!
