4 ms·
There's actually a parity to the positions of the pieces that most people don't seem to know about. If you flip an edge or twist a corner, the whole cube become
by falcrist 4y ago
There's actually a parity to the positions of the pieces that most people don't seem to know about. If you flip an edge or twist a corner, the whole cube becomes unsolvable.
You can also make it unsolvable by swapping stickers because each piece is unique. There is only one red/white/blue corner and only one green/yellow edge. Assuming standard color arrangement, there is no piece with both yellow and white, or both blue and green, or both red and orange.
- frob 4y agoThe guy I learned to speedcube from was so good that we would secretly flip a corner or edge on his cube, challenge him to a race, and he would solve it to the point where only one piece was flipped, curse at us, fix it himself, and still beat us all by at least 10 seconds.
- falcrist 4y agoDepending on his method, he probably saw the problem immediately when he got to the last layer.
- buu700 4y agoYep, it would be readily apparent by that point. You wouldn't even need to "solve" it first; you would see pretty much instantly that the last layer was in an impossible position. Source: I got into speedcubing for a couple years in high school and averaged in the 30s, with a record of 26 seconds.
- frob 4y agoThis is absolutely true. I believe he was at least using ZLL at that time, so it only took him 10-15 seconds to figure it out.
- icambron 4y agoA friend of mine got into a Rubik’s Cube in college. As a prank, we swapped the stickers on his cube and were amazed when he noticed it in a few seconds and correctly identified what was swapped. Familiarity with the invariants