During the week before Christmas, I convinced myself that I had to solve the Rubik’s cube. So, on Friday evening, I took a printout of the beginner’s tutorial by Jasmine Lee. I got my cube the next day. After fiddling with the cube for well over two hours, I finally solved it. It was about 1 a.m. The next day, I got myself to solve the cube without referring back to the tutorial. After much practice, I was even able to slash down my solving time to 6-7 minutes. My current record is 4:30 minutes.
Last evening, when I was playing with my cube, I had an epiphany. I realized that solving the Rubik’s cube is very much like doing cryptanalysis. The solved cube is our plain text. The cube can be scrambled (encrypted) using an algorithm such as F B’ U F2 R2 D’ R2 L2 D’ B’ R2 F2 D’ B2 L F2 U’ R2 F2 L2 U F’ R’ D’ L. The key can be the colour of one of the four faces – front, left, back or right – before starting the encryption. If we know the algorithm and the key, we could solve the cube. But since this is not known, other techniques (cryptanalysis) are employed to solve the cube.
4 Comments
January 8, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Try the lars petrus method .. itz more efficient in terms of the number of moves … itz used for speed cubing ..
January 8, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Above comment by Johnny ^
January 17, 2008 at 4:34 am
@Prestidigitator and Johnny: I read about the Lars Petrus method. But, I want to understand the cube. So, I am just fiddling with it to know it better. Probably, after that I would move on to better methods (including the Lars Petrus method). Anyway, I was able to bring down my time to 03:48 minutes.
June 19, 2008 at 1:39 am
Somehow i missed the point. Probably lost in translation
Anyway … nice blog to visit.
cheers, Hinterland.