The Rubik's CubeThe most well known, most loved, most hated of the twisty puzzles:
HistoryRubik's Cube is a 3-D mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik.
Originally called the "Magic Cube", the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toy Corp. in 1980 and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle that year.
As of January 2009, 350 million cubes had been sold worldwide making it the world's top-selling puzzle game. It is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy.
Can you solve it?With 43 Quintillion possibilities for just the 3x3x3 and millions of cubes sold, do you think that you can solve it?
If you can't, there are tutorials. Lots of tutorials. For instance,
THE TUTORIALWe've got CFOP Fridrich, Petrus, Roux, Beginners, Corners-first and the ZZ method. Pick your poison.
The most widely used for speedcubing is the CFOP or Fridrich method. This requires around 80 algorithms to learn completely, which is crazy!
As such, 2-look CFOP has been made, to reduce the Algorithm count to only 18.
TimesIn speedsolving, you want the best time. So, let's talk times. Jury Froeschl won the first world record with 38 seconds, generally considered now
to be very slow. A year later, Minh Thai won the record with 22.95 seconds. And now, in 2012 we have insane records. Feliks Zemdegs set a record of
5.66 seconds for a single solve using the DaYan ZanChi. My own personal times are very slow, in comparison. My average is about 45 seconds and my record is about 35 seconds. This is in no way a record time, but I am trying to get better.
PuzzlesNow we come to the thick of it. The real deal. The Puzzles. SO. MANY. PUZZLES.
Popular shops for Puzzles:
http://mefferts.com/http://www.witeden.com/http://www.speedcubeshop.com/http://www.cubedepotusa.com/http://cube4you.com/and you can get a bunch of puzzles on Amazon.
Now, if you are looking to get into Speedcubing for a 3x3x3, I reccomend either a DaYan ZhanChi or a DaYan GuHong.
They are considered to be the best and I certainly think so.
My prefered cubes:
LanLan 2x2
DaYanZhanChi 3x3
LanLan 4x4
and then V-Cubes take power from 5x5 to 7x7.
But then, there are not just cubes. There are cuboids (1x2x3, 1x3x3, 2x3x3 etc.) There are other puzzles
that are even more insane. It's so varied it would be impossible to make an accumulation of every type of puzzle.
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