Mark's Blog

I've been getting substantial amounts of traffic to my Rubik's Cube web page recently, averaging around 550 hits a day. A number of blogs and general link sites have been kind enough to link to me. I did get a link from TotalFark one day, but thankfully it did not make it to regular Fark, as the bandwidth bill would have been unpleasant. One fellow blogger linked to my page and said: "I do have to say that solving a Rubik's cube is one of those things that blurs the 'cool/loser' line."

I've been thinking of learning a third solution to the cube. Phil Marshall's solution looks promising, requiring 65 moves. I think the solution I use takes more like 100-110 moves on average, so this could potentially speed up my times by 40% or so, assuming that the solution doesn't take much more thinking or looking time that can't really be done in parallel with the moves.

I lubed my cube tonight (is this on the "loser" side of the line?) using some silicone spray, in the hopes of improving my times a bit. I think I put a bit too much on, as the cube now turns very freely. Next time I will use a little less. My cube is not in very good shape, with a lot of the stickers peeling, so I will probably have to get a new one soon anyway.

Given that I had a faster cube, I tried timing myself with The Ultimate Rubik's Cube Timer. My best average time was 61.4 seconds (the average is calculated by taking 12 consecutive times, and discarding the fastest and the slowest time) and my fastest single time was 48.25 seconds. I had a few 80-second times, due to various mistakes, which drove the average up a bit. I don't have a recent carefully-timed session to compare with, but I think this was probably 5-10 seconds faster than my recent average has been.

I noticed one neat site while checking my referer logs. An Irish student implemented a Rubik's Cube solving Java program using at least part of Solution #1 on my page. It looks like some of the moves towards the end of the solution are different though.