Rubik's Cube®

Solutions for The Cube

• Easy to learn
  On Matthew Monroe's Cube Page there is a very easy solution to the cube. What makes it easy is that it involves very few canned sequences that you have memorize.

• Layers
  The first solution I learned was from Don Taylor's book, Mastering Rubik's Cube. It works in a 3-layer approach where you solve one side, the four edge cubes in the next layer, then the last side. Layer solutions are nice because you can see steady progress, but they are bad for speed because after solving the first layer, all the moves are complicated by the fact that you can't mess up the first layer.

  On Denny's Puzzle Pages, there is a layer solution with many pictures. He also has solutions for the pocket cube and Rubik's Revenge.

  Jake Olesky's CubeSolver is a well documented step-by-step layer solution.

  Skip Lawson has another layer solution with cool pictures showing each move.

  On the official Rubik's Cube web site, they have two layer solutions, old and new, posted. They also have links to other solutions of 2x2x2, 3x3x3, 4x4x4, and 5x5x5 Rubik's Cube puzzles.

• Fast
  Philip Marshall's Ultimate Solution solves a cube in 65 moves. He also has solutions for the 4x4x4 Rubik's Revenge, the 2x2x2 pocket cube, and the 5x5x5 'professor' cube.

  Lars Petrus describes the speed solution that won him the Swedish championships and got him 4th in the world championships in Budapest. This page features a great Java applet that animates each sequence.

Applets

• Karl Hörnell's Rubik Unbound applet is very slick.
• Yuh-Jye Chang's Virtual Reality Magic Cube looks very nice but is very quirky and hard to use.

Solvers

• Cube Explorer is a Windows 95 executable that computes very efficient solution sequences, in around 19 moves according to the author, Herbert Kociemba. This is a really cool tool, though a Java applet version would be nice.

• Dan Knight's Java applet will solve your cube in about 50 moves, and you don't need to download and native software--it runs in your browser.

Other Rubik's Cube Pages

• Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica, have a nice page discussing the mathematics of The Cube, along with some useful links.

• Twisty Megasite is a nice looking page covering all things cube related. The author even has early designs for an unprecedented 6x6x6 cube!

• Two German engineering nerds (I mean that in a good way :-)) have built a robot that solves Rubik's Cubes®.

• Mark Longridge's Domain of the Cube has patterns, move sequences, and much much more...

• Dan Knight has a great page (check out his cube collection!) featuring his own solution, and a cube solving Java applet. Enter your cube's configuration, or play with the applet for a while, and let it figure out a solution.

• Cube Lovers mailing list archive

• The Wunderland, a home page for a couple folks that are big Rubik's Cube fans, one of whom was actually on "That's Incredible!" solving the Cube.