It was the summer of 1993. After finishing elementary school, and receiving a prize for the best maths pupil for good measure, I faced the nice prospect of two months of well earned fun and play away from class.
A few weeks into my summer break, I was getting fed up with playing games on the Amiga all day long. I looked around the house and inside a box full of board games and other puzzles I found a Rubik’s Cube.
Although the cube wasn’t all that new to me - my parents were Rubik’s puzzle collectors from day one - this was the first time I had a proper look at it and actually attempted to work out how to solve it.
From that day on, I made it my mission to devote my entire holiday to…
Trying to solve the cube for the first time
After a few days of fiddling around with it, without much success, my father stepped in and taught me the basics of the cube. He showed me how the cube is composed of different cubies and that the center pieces are fixed and are the main guide for solving the other pieces. He then went on to teach me the first steps for solving the cube layer-by-layer: first make a cross on the top layer, insert the corners to complete the top layer and put in the middle layer edges.
But then what? My father himself hadn’t touched a cube for years. He still remembered how to solve the first two layers because that could be achieved with some intuitive and short patterns. But when he got to the last layer, he started to twitch. After some trial and error he managed to make a cross on the last layer and that was about as far as he could get.
“But wait”, he said. “We have a solution booklet somewhere. Let me see if I can find it.” My father started to dig around in his closet. “Here it is! It’s all explained in here!”
What he gave me wasn’t really a printed book in the same genre as David Singmaster’s or James Nourse’s solution books, but a binder with hand-written notes from my mother. Entirely in Dutch and with the help of hand-doodled diagrams (no notation!), it explained the same layer-by-layer method that my father tried to teach me.
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| Once upon a time there was a cube… | Left, down, right, up,… |
Interestingly it also contained an article on Ernö Rubik from the local newspaper Het Belang van Limburg dating back to February 1981. Unlike most articles that are published on the cube these days, this one was written very well and didn’t contain any false statements or silly errors. At least the authors bothered to double check their facts back then.
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| The magic cube conquers the world |
When my father handed me the solution booklet, I looked at it like it was some kind of treasure and I couldn’t wait to flip through the pages to see if I could finally crack the puzzle.
So close but yet so far
The solution booklet was very instructive and written in a clear and simple language. However, it didn’t take me too long to work out that there was something wrong with it.
As it got to the last layer of the cube, it described how to permute and orient the edges. Then it proceeded by saying: “All that is left to do is solve the corners by applying the following 22 moves:”.
What followed was a blank page, and another one, and another one,…
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| Not quite a happy ending |
Apparently, someone once took out the page with the magical algorithm for the last step so that he or she could carry it around and use it as a cheat sheet.
No need to say I was taken aback after going through all the excitement. But I wasn’t going to give up easily.
Eureka!
Then one morning I finally did it! No, I didn’t work out how to solve it. I solved it by accident. After dozens of tries, the corners of the last layer where already solved after permuting and orienting the edges.
Although my first solve was lucky, that didn’t spoil my euphoria and I proudly presented my solved cube to my dad. “That’s my son”, I could see him think.
I managed to solve the cube a few more times after that, but it quickly became a bit boring to rely on luck and keep starting over and over again hoping that the corners would be solved accidentally. I decided to be creative and try and find my own algorithms for the last step.
I put the blank pages at the end of the binder to good use and began making notes to study the effects of the algorithms that were listed in the binder.
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| Do it yourself! | |
I worked out that applying one of the edge orientation algorithms 3 times left the edges intact and swapped 2 pairs of corners. Applying that same edge orientation algorithm 4 times on different sides of the cube, left the edges and the location of the corners intact and only twisted 3 corners.
With these extra tricks in my armory, I was able to solve the cube more consistently but it was still rather long-winded.
From noob to novice
A few weeks later, while cleaning out the attic, I discovered that we had a book with more advanced tricks and methods for solving the cube: De Hongaarse Kubus by Frans Schiereck.
The book contained a very interesting approach to solving to cube which was centered around “routines”. A routine is a move sequence that looks like X Y X’ Y’, basically what is called sexy move nowadays. All the steps in the method used algorithms that were composed of such routines, sometimes preceded and followed by some setup moves.
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| De Hongaarse Kubus by Frans Schiereck, printed in October 1981 | |
A lot of move sequences where the same as in the solution method I learnt from the hand-written notes from my mother, but this time I actually understood how they worked and I could remember and execute them much more easily because I saw them as a sequence of two or three routines. And of course, this book also had a complete method with more efficient algorithms for the last step that I used to struggle with.
At the end of the book, there was a chapter with interesting facts about the Rubik’s Cube, some of which sound absolutely hilarious now. The author mentions cube competitions and tells how a Hungarian guy won a competition in 55 seconds and how amazing he thinks that is. He then says that he read in a magazine that some German guy could do it in 24 seconds and he simply doesn’t believe that could ever be equalled a second time. “Impossible!” 
From puzzling to speedcubing
Now that I had a decent solving technique, I could solve the cube regularly in under 3 minutes. It quickly became very addictive and it wasn’t too long before I started timing myself with a stopwatch and kept trying to improve my personal best.
Although I never managed to get faster than one minute on average for many years to come, for me that was the moment I became a speedcuber. Once you’re able to solve the cube, have that desire to keep getting faster at it and simply can’t put it away, there’s no turning back.
I think every cuber has fond memories of holding a cube in their hands for the first time, going through the onslaught of working out how to solve it and finally succeeding at it. In my case it was a particularly bumpy road but it certainly had its charm and I’m proud that I was able to get that far considering how little help I got.
In a way, it’s a pity that once you can solve a Rubik’s Cube, it loses a bit of its magic and you won’t be able to re-experience that feeling ever again.
Things will just never be the same.