My grandson is obsessed with solving Rubik’s Cubes. I had one, maybe a few — everyone did, back in the day. I had a book that showed me how to solve it, and back then, I could take a scrambled cube and solve it in a few minutes. I felt pretty good about that.
I had nothing like the gear he has. He has cubes you can take apart to adjust tension, spacing, oil level — I dunno. A few things. He has an electronic cube that pairs you up with another competitor, gives you a scramble, confirms when you both have made the scramble, and times the solve and presents the results in a nice report. He has several 3×3 cubes, a 2×2 cube, a “Skewb”, which is a 3×3 cube twisted halfway through another dimension, he has a 5×5 cube, a 6×6 cube, some combination cube and fidget spinner — he’s got a few of them, and he plays them all.
He signed up to compete with some of the best cubers in New England this weekend. (And beyond — one of the competitors was from Oklahoma). This was pretty brave, for a ten year old. And he did not do too badly for his first competition.
There were quite a few kids his age (and some of them were extremely good). A few teens, a few adults. More girls than I expected. I thought having adults competing with children would be a little unfair, but by and large, the kids smoked the adults.
It’s the brain. The brain plasticity. Adults just can’t focus like kids can. I call it the plastic brain vs the microplastic brain 🙂
My grandson didn’t compete in the “blind 3×3” competition, but this is the only competition I would ever consider competing in. Your time starts when the cube is revealed by the judge. You can spend as much time as you like examining the cube, then you put on a blindfold and solve it. When you drop it and hit the timer, you can take off the blindfold and see if you solved it, or were no more than two moves away from solving it. You had five attempts, and the total time through all five attempts could not be more than fifteen minutes. The top competitor’s best time was 56.45s, and even they didn’t manage to solve it all five times. Half the competitors didn’t solve the cube even once.
I was lucky enough to be seated with one of the top blind 3×3 solvers, and I asked him about it. He said he imagines it like a song; the eight corners are letters, the edges make words, and the motions are music. He examines the cube, converts it music, puts on the blindfold and sings the song back to the cube, and three times out of five, it’s solved.
I was fascinated. My microplastic brain was well and truly blown. I could imagine a scrambled cube that contained music only blind solvers could hear. And by hearing the music, implicitly seeing it solved. It would never be solved in real life, only passed around, a symphony for those that could hear.
This is the reason I’d only ever learn blind solving, right from the start. Solving the 3×3 the usual way is to use algorithms, tricks and heuristics to solve the cube. Do this algorithm until you’ve got the corners you like; and now this one to get the white face solved; and then this next one until you’re done. These algorithms are crutches. People solving a 3×3 in less than five seconds know everything they need to do before they do their first move. People solving the 2×2 in less than three seconds have memorized each of the 64 possible combinations and know the solution by sight.
The AI-generated image may have people thinking my grandson didn’t get his personal best time. Here’s his time after the 2×2 solve.
And, for completeness, this is his personal best 3×3 solve, 29.981 seconds.
