Two-part Rubik’s algorithms
Created 26 February 2017
When Rubik’s Cube first appeared decades ago, I jumped on it. I bought one, and spent an entire summer fiddling with it. Over that summer, I developed a solving technique that has stuck with me. My technique is not the fastest; that was never the goal. My algorithms make sense to me because they are constructed, and can be understood by that construction.
I’m not going to explain an entire solution technique here. I want to explain how some algorithms are constructed. I’m not claiming this construction technique is unique to me, though I did develop it for myself that summer long ago.
Algorithms
An algorithm is a sequence of turns that accomplishes a useful change to the cube, usually a small change. For example, the algorithm I’ll explain in detail here twists two edge pieces, and leaves the rest of the cube unchanged.
Because of the way the cube moves, there are limits to what kinds of algorithms are possible. For example, you cannot twist just one edge piece, or swap just two corners. You must twist two edge pieces, or swap two pairs of corners. These constraints work well with my algorithm construction technique, because it is based on doing “the same thing” twice, but in slightly different places. Twisting two edge pieces is twisting an edge piece, twice, on two different edge pieces.
I’ll demonstrate moves here using Conrad Rider’s impressive TwistySim library. You can play, rewind, and single-step through the animations. The notation at the top of each animation is Cube notation but you can ignore that and just watch the animations if you like.
Two-part algorithms
Here’s how a two-part algorithm works: mentally divide the cube into two zones. The top zone is the top layer, and the bottom zone is the bottom two layers. Here I’ve made a cube with red for the top zone and blue for the bottom zone:
To create a two-part algorithm, you need to come up with a sequence of turns that will accomplish half your goal. So if you are trying to flip two edges, you need a sequence that will flip one edge. Here’s where the zones come into it: your sequence needs to do its job on a top-zone piece, and leave the rest of the top zone alone. It can scramble the bottom zone as much as it needs to, it doesn’t matter at all what happens to the bottom zone.
Usually when trying to design algorithms, the hard part is not scrambling the rest of the cube. That’s the beauty of this technique: it’s not that hard to come up with a series of moves if you don’t care at all what happens in the bottom two layers of the cube.
For example, here’s a flipping sequence that will flip one edge in the top zone. Watch the green-yellow edge:
If you track any red piece, you can see that it is unaffected by this flipping sequence. The blue pieces are scrambled all over the place, but that is fine, don’t worry.
The second part
OK, so we’ve gotten half-way there, but the bottom of the cube is a total mess. How do we fix it? This is where the key idea of a two-part algorithm comes into it. Turn the top layer a quarter turn, and then: do that same flipping sequence, but backwards!
Doing the flipping sequence backwards will still flip an edge piece in the top zone. But the bottom zone will go through the reverse of the sequence that messed it up, so it will go exactly back to where it started!
When the backward flipping sequence is done, turn the top layer back a quarter turn, and you’ve completed the mission: two edge pieces in the top layer are flipped, and nothing else on the cube has been changed:
Here’s the same algorithm on a realistically colored cube, so you can see what it does:
Adapting
One of the great things about this style of algorithm is that you can adapt it for more uses. The algorithm I just showed was for flipping two adjacent edge pieces (on two edges that share a corner). But we can easily make a small change to flip two edges across a face from each other.
The basic flipping sequence is the same. But instead of using a quarter turn between the two halves, we use a half turn:
Instead of having dozens of obscure algorithms to memorize, we can use a single idea of an algorithm for any two-edge flipping situation, and adapt it to where the edges are.
Other algorithms
Another basic algorithm is to twist two corners. You might be able to design your own two-part algorithm to do it. Here’s mine:
Rotating three corners means picking three corners, and moving corner 1 to where corner 2 was, moving corner 2 to where corner 3 was, and moving corner 3 to where corner 1 was. For a two part algorithm, think of this as swapping corners 1 and 2, and then swapping corners 2 and 3:
Notice for both of these that if you change the top-layer quarter-turn into a half turn, you get another useful algorithm.
As I said, these algorithms aren’t the fastest, but I was never a speed cuber. I’d rather have moves that I can understand.
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