Aji's Rubik's Cube Page

Drag this cube to a blank browser window and resize before clicking on the following links.

I use this Rubik's Cube applet rather than others because it doesn't have the blinding white background and the programmer allows others to use it with attribution.  Mousing tight circles clockwise will rotate entire cube counter-clockwise and vice versa.

My Solution:

When I first got a Rubik's Cube many years ago I didn't want to read any solutions or have anyone show me moves so I could find a method of solving it by myself.  Unfortunately I cannot find the folder containing my notes right now.  When I do find it I will update this page with the details.

I will explain my approach to the problem.  However, I had another related goal in mind.  I wanted to program Z-80 assembly code to do a brute-force search for a solution as well as keep track of manipulations.  It didn't take long for me to realize I was up against the law of large numbers and knew it probibly would not find a solution before the year 4000aa (anno Aji) but still calculated instruction execution times and expanded the most intensive loops to save milliseconds in execution time.

First I needed a notation to keep track of cube-state and manipulations.  My cube had white opposite blue so I kept white on top for frame of reference.  A quarter rotation was indicated by the face color as determined by the center square color with clockwise assumed unless a negative sign preceded the face color: R-W indicating clockwise rotation of Red face followed by counter-clockwise 1/4 rotation of White face, RR or -R-R indicating a 180 degree rotation of Red face.

Since I could solve the top two layers with little difficulty I concentrated on transformations that would change the bottom layer leaving the top 2 layers in the initial condition of being solved.  My first discovery was the easy transformation.  The 2nd was only slightly more complex but still very simple.  The 3rd was much more convoluted AND had to be repeated 3 times!  By anayzing these I was able to achieve the total method.

Unfortunately the following link is out of date and I have contacted Jake via his web site to inquire about an updated link or the permission to post his easy-to-implement complete solution method here.

I have not recieved a reply in the two days since I missived him Feb 15, 2005.

Jake Olefsky's Rubik's Cube Solution Guide

There are many other solutions easy to find on the Internet but will not bother providing links here to them until I have time evaluate which ones easiest to understand.

Thanks to mackeyrj at the Zone Bridge Club for letting me know how to encode an additional space in text in HTML.