By ET

I got a Rubik’s Cube.

It is different from the canonical Rubik’s Cube (shown on the left) in that it has different patterns (characters, graphs, figures) on the 6 sides instead of pure colored squares.

The patterned Cube turns to be harder than the canonical Cube.

See the Picture below for an example of patterned Cube:

Note that the centered square can be easily misaligned when you complete the cube. It can be frustrating to try to align the center piece and destroy the completed pieces.

Here is a solution I use, forgive me if this is not absolutely clear, but you can find out the notation from any Rubik’s cube related website,

1 - Complete the 1st side, ignore the centered piece if it is misaligned, note that we have one layer completely finished now
2 - position corners of the opposite side of the completed layer.
put the completed side to the back, the to-be-completed side will be facing you
u-1 f u l-1 u l u-1 f2
Stop once you have all 4 corner’s positioned right (not necessarily oriented, we will address that in the next step)

3 - orient corners
u-1 f2 u f u-1 f u f2
Stop once the 4 corners are aligned and oriented, so basically, the side facing you should have a pattern like this:

X a X
b X c
X d X

where Xs represent the same color, ignore the center piece’s orientation again.

4 - complete side 2

put the completed side on the top, and the side 2 on the bottom, use the following combination to insert the missing pieces of X to the bottom.
b= f h2 f-1
r= f-1 h f

5 - keyhole

the previous step may leave one piece misplaced on the top layer (the completed side), use the following combination to get it back
r= f h-1 f-1 h-1 f h f-1
f= f h-1 f-1 h2 f-1 h-1 f

After this step, we have two opposite layers completely finished, go to the next steps to finish the center layer

6 - position 4 pieces on the corner

Use the following moves to put the 4 pieces on the corner of the center layer into position, use step 7 to orient them
v u2 v-1 u2
7 - orient 4 pieces
v u v u v u2 v-1 u v-1 u v-1 u2

8 - center

If you have a canonical Rubik’s cube, you don’t need this step, after step 7, you are all set. If the center pieces are not aligned, please use this to rotate the top center piece counter-clock-wisely, and rotate the left center piece clock-wisely. Use your intelligence to find out how to orient the center pieces with the minimum moves!
v-1 h-1 v u v-1 h v u-1

Here I can give two great Rubik’s Cube pages, they give pointers to other great resources.

http://www.math.ucf.edu/~reid/Rubik/

http://www.speedcubing.com/chris/

By ET This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2005 at 10:50 pm and is filed under General, Play, Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.