Do you cube? I heard smart guys cube

kys

and you keep practicing those OLL algos, Im sure someone will start loving you once you hit sub 20

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Sub-15 here. I own around 40 cubes and by far the Lubix GuHong V1 (pretty much the first or second speedcube that I got) is my all time favourite. I know it's an old cube, but it's a genuine oldie but goldie.
Also own the Lubix Elite which was $100 and it's nice but I don't think it's worth the price at all.

Learn the Fridrich method.

>Also, solve cross on bottom.
He should also learn to be colour neutral since he's a beginner. Once you're good, it's really hard to become colour neutral out of habit.

>I'd prefer something more stable
I don't think that there's anything more unstable than the LingYun to be honest, especially a modified one.
Following closely in terms of instability is the LunHui. They added torpedoes in an attempt to reduce pops, but instead you end up with an entire row of cubies popping out.

Color neutrality is different from solving cross on bottom though. A lot of people like to solve cross on top because they can see the cross as its being formed, but then you cant see other pieces and you also waste a second flipping the cube upsidedown.

A Zhanchi is really outdated unless meant for OH. You can get a better cube for a lesser price (ex. Thunderclap). The zhanchi isn't going to be much better than a guhong. You've wasted your money.

They're different (obviously, did I imply that they were the same?), but something that should be learnt together.
And yes, you should use the inspection time to completely do the cross and a couple of F2L pairs in your head, then just execute them whilst looking for the third and fourth pairs.

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I used to. Was fun for a time.

If you're using the beginner's method, it shouldn't take you more than a minute. You're probably just moving too slow. Practice your finger triggers.

Then do these

>he believes in anthropogenic climate change
how much wool are you producing for your master?

>Practice your finger triggers.
This, also do it on a speedcube.
If you practice fingertricks on a stiff cube like the Rubik's Cube, then you'll overshoot very badly on actual speedcubes and cause pops.

I can solve it but I don't see the point in trying to go AS FAST AS YOU CAN to solve it

Honestly if they aren't azn, I find cubers to be quite edgy

Feliks Zemdegs has a lot of world records but is Australian.
He only learnt one handed too because he broke his right hand in some skateboarding accident.

What is the best way to learn solving these with no talent in combinatorics?

I learned to cube on the internet because I'm a failure and got down to 60-70 second solve 8 years ago. I learned 4x4 roughly for fun and then stopped.

A few weeks ago I saw a shitter on youtube explain that it's easy as shit to teach yourself from scratch using commutators. I'm still fucking pissed.

You don't need to know any combinatorics unless you want to calculate the order of The Rubik's Cube Group. Just learn the Fridrich method from the start instead of bothering with the terrible beginner's method. You'll be sub 40 within 2 weeks.

You can, but using commutators won't make you faster.

Thanks! Gives me hope to solve these fuckers.

With some friends at university we give a free course about cubing. We teach methods to solve different cubes. It's a funny activity and we can share our hobby with people and impress girls with our speed cubing abilitties

You're welcome!
I highly recommend learning from badmephisto:
youtube.com/user/badmephisto
If it's any sort of validation of how good he is, I'm the sub-15 guy here:My university had an actual module on the algebra behind the cube once, too bad that it's no longer around.
>impress girls
>mfw my girlfriend's mum is more impressed than the actual gf

Yeah, I fooled no one with that:
>impress girls

I didn't mean to complain about being slow. I gave up solving the puzzle on my own and then got cucked by mathematician explaining commutation to a preteen as "how to figure it out yourself".

Oh, it didn't come across as complaining at all.
Well, that "figuring it out yourself" consists of sitting down and coming up with your own algorithms, which aren't necessarily fast to execute. It's interesting from a mathematical point of view, but you still need some insight into how the cubes work. The way that the commutators work is (move cubies out of the way)(perform what you want to do)(undo move cubies out of the way).
There's honestly no point in learning to do it like this, and only a handful of cubers have out of curiosity.
I've written a mathematical paper containing this and I show that you actually only need two algorithms + some intelligence to solve the cube.

Do you guys have a preferred plastic color?

Black, but only because it's what I started with. I'm slower with white because it appears way too bright to me.
There are also stickerless cubes which somehow feel better to use than stickered cubes... they're banned from competitions however because you can see more than 3 faces at once using them.

I guess you could use it as a conversational starting point though. When girls (and guys) see that I can speedcube, their reaction is often "wow that's so cool, can you teach me?" or the generic story of how they gave up etc. I do actually end up teaching some of them though. In terms of girls, only a handful of them actually follow through to the end and manage to solve the cube on their own.

I think that stickerless cubes are competition legal now. Can look it up somewhere.

I knew stickerless was banned but not why, TIL. Wonder if anyone will go through the effort of colored plastic face pieces snapped into separate plastic cubies and recessed slightly. I've never used one but they sound nice.

>cubed a little
>got bored of it
>started working towards figuring out a way to optimally solve in the least moves
>realized that it would be a waste of my time
>and that was that
>haven't cubed since, nor do I care to

The Aolong GT would be able to do something like that.
All you would need is to have the caps colored.

Wow, they've been competition legal since July 2015, thanks for the update user!

>Wonder if anyone will go through the effort of colored plastic face pieces snapped into separate plastic cubies and recessed slightly. I've never used one but they sound nice.
Well, the new Rubik's Brand cubes are like that, but as usual, they're absolute garbage.

If you got good at solving in little moves, then the FMC (fewest move count) competitions would be great for you.

That's a subject with a lot of existing work in it - it would only be a waste of time to start from scratch. Unless you're just interested in brute-force searching with a heuristic on a given case.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_solutions_for_Rubik's_Cube

My Rubik's brand cube's stickers are falling off after 30+ years of use.
What should I buy to replace it?

I don't care about speed solving, I usually just solve one side and then another when I'm bored.

What do you look for in a cube then?

Shengshou 3x3.
It's like $3 or $4.

Not falling apart would be the only criteria I care about.
I'd like to get one that'd last a long time.

Consider buying stickers too, a 3-pack was like $6 years ago for me. A worn cube is generally better, though I've never traded up to a speedcube brand so grain of salt.

This: Cubesmith make very high quality stickers that look good and last a long time, search them up.

>growing mental capacity for imagining multi-step combinatoric transformations is useless for mathematicians
>also global warming is false

>Cubesmith
Forgot the name but I used them :)

The Half-Bright Set is the most popular one if that helps!

this pattern is made by flipping the horizontal and vertical centers 180 degrees
I used to try to figure out how to make tons of patterns like this after I got bored of messing it up and solving it again.

I find that cubesmith stickers are dark, so the most recent set of stickers I bought were from a japanese online store called tribox, which have colors that are brighter and I like them.

Tribox!!!
The last time I heard that name was 5 years ago - back then they were doing a private auction for a cube and the prices went really really high for it... not sure what to search to find it again though.

triboxstickers.com

I was irritated that he didn't do the last turn to checkerboard. I assumed every cuber in the world learned to checkerboard and cube-in-a-cube by themselves. Most patterns are better on 4x4x4 in my opinion.

rubiks.wikia.com/wiki/Patterns

Thanks for the link, but I didn't mean their site - I meant the results of the auction, or anything about it.

tfw when I knew Fridrich's signal processing work before her cubing work. She gives me the hugest boner

A long time ago coloured plastic other than black and white used to actually feel softer, some of them more buttery than others.
Not sure how it is now though.

It's for braindeads who think repeatedly applying the same algorith lm is entertaining.

The perfect hobby for an engineer.

No one likes learning algorithms, but even ones with many variants such as the G-Perm take at most 5 minutes to learn if you know how to learn algorithms.

>engineer
fucking filthy engineers don't mention that name in this thread

But that's all there is to it.

The first two steps of the Fridrich method is where you really cut down on your time, and those steps are done without algorithms.
There it's a matter of how well you can see ahead and track pieces around the cube. It's very much an instantaneous improvisation.
For the last two steps where you solve the last layer you do need to learn algorithms. Heck, a handful of people have actually learnt the last layer in one step by learning 1212 algorithms (as opposed to 81, though this can be lowered to just 15 if you learn it in 4 steps).

>he pretends to know about things that he doesn't actually understand
Why not just accept that you don't know something and ask about it instead?

not a speed cuber, but I have dozens of these kind of puzzles. 2x2 is my favorite simply because of how simple it is, but I also like the strange shaped ones like pic related and the few with sudoko/other designs on them.

Takes me a minute to solve a 3x3. Boring because it's nothing new. I have no interest in being fast. I like the process of solving all the different kinds.

I take WAYY too long on my cross and F2L, after that it's easy as fuck with the 2-look. What should I do?

Welcome! You're definitely a cuber :)
You might want to check out shapeways (they produce a lot of twisty puzzles).
The only "weird" cubes that I own are the void cube, some 2x2x4 and the bump cube/mirror block.

To practice your cross you should ignore the 15 second inspection time and instead make it as long as you want. The aim is to solve the entire cross in your head, close your eyes, then do it.
At first you may not be able to solve all four cross pieces, so go for two or three then build up towards four.

For F2L, there's an important transition between the cross and the F2L. The whole point of being able to do the cross without looking is so that you can hunt for F2L pairs whilst your hands are solving the cross. Additionally, you should also work on your TPS (turn per second) with your look ahead. Solve the F2L very very very slowly at a consistent TPS and build it up. Start with 1 TPS and keep at that speed until the whole F2L is done. This is how people can do a very smooth F2L with no pauses at high TPS.
Consistent TPS is much much better than someone who does burst speed, pause, burst speed and so on.

How was it?

Do any of you have suggestions for good models of 4x4 or possibly 5x5? Just ordered a stickerless Guhong V2 3x3 super cheap after considering the suggestions in this thread.

I've only owned Rubik's brand 3x3 and 4x4. My 3x3's were stiff even after attempts to improve them as is unsurprising, and the 4x4 was loose as fuck but more importantly broke a corner within weeks. Was too frustrated to drop another $40 at the time (I see prices have come down though) and never improved at 4x4 (it works but is a fragile pain).

The Shengshou 4x4 is great. Becomes really really nice with a small amount of lube (order some lubix, which you'll need anyway since you'll own speedcubes - cubes build up cube dust if they're not lubed and it eventually slows down your cube... you'll end up having to completely clean your cube out to get it working again).
For 5x5, if you're willing to put a lot of time into it, you can use the V-Cube 5, but really, you need to put a lot of time into it before the cube becomes nice (a few hundred solves).
Otherwise, the Maru 5x5 is another nice option.
I would have recommended the Maru 4x4 as well but there's a problem with their core and it requires some modification to fix it which I'm not sure you want to do.

Man, you can try it too. Don't do it near pseudo-intellectuals though; they get triggered by it easily ;^)

>My 3x3's were stiff even after attempts to improve them as is unsurprising
I spent around 20 hours on a brand new Rubik's brand cube modifying (breaking it in with a drill, sanding it, lubing it) and the end result was slightly worse than a speedcube, but there really was a huge difference.
Something even better to do would be to replace the core and rivets of the cube and replace them with a cube4you core, springs, washers and screws.
But then there's the question of whether it's still the Rubik's cube anymore after those parts are removed...

YJs make great footcubes if you were ever interested (27 x 27 x 27 cm iirc).

I use the Moyu Aolong v2.
>Fastest recorded time: 21.58 seconds
>Current average of 12: 29.94

It's a hobby and a sport. Nobody claims that you need to be smart in order to solve a cube. I know plenty of brainlets that cube.

What's your ao5 user?

How many of you are into other twisty puzzles? I've only done 2x2 through 4x4 cubes and know nothing about algorithms and techniques of other puzzles.

At some point in my childhood the first twisty puzzle I touched was a Pyraminx for a few minutes. I assume Pyraminx isn't very comparable to Megaminx?

What about supercubes (oriented stickers)? Just curious what opinions you have on them. Recently was reminded of them when I saw the "Real 6x6x6" on Oskar's channel: youtube.com/watch?v=zrdwk3xTHyA

Morphing puzzles scare me on account of figuring out how to label moves, but perhaps sometime.

A 13 with the fucking waterman method?

Some Moyu brand

Learn full CFOP and practice

This is true. However, there are patrician events like fewest moves and the blindfold events.

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>fucker can't even scramble right