Introduction and Terminology
The Cube has been invented by the Hungarian Ernö Rubik in the seventies and after the big craze of the early eighties it suddenly disappeared. Now, it is back again and many try to solve it, but find out that it is not so easy. This step by step tutorial will help you to solve any scrambled 3x3x3 Cube.
I’m trying to make it simple, but this means that it will not be as fast as speedcubing methods.
The Cube partially open
6 centre pieces can rotate on a six armed spider
12 edge cubies (=edges) sit between two centres and have two stickers of the adjacent centres
8 corner cubies (=corners) sit in three faces, are surrounded by three edges and have three stickers of the adjacent centres on them
Terminology
cubie = piece
face
The little pieces building the Cube. The 6 centre cubies (or pieces) are fixed and can never leave their place. An edge cubie will always stay an edge and a corner cubie always a corner. The Rubik’s Cube is built out of 26 pieces and the six-armed spider instead of a 27th inner cubie.
Any Cube (Hexagon) has six faces. (Greek word hex = six). On one face of the 3x3x3 you will always see nine squares with nine stickers, the surface of 1 centre piece surrounded by 4 edges and 4 corners.
On the picture we see a white, green and red face of the solved Cube
naming of faces
Look at a Cube sitting on a table. The face to your right is named R (Right), to your left L (Left), the face on top U (Up), the face on the table D (Down), the face facing you F (Front), and the face at the back B (Back)
On a picture like to your right you can only see three faces. Layers L (opposite to R), B (opposite to F) and D (opposite to U) are invisible on the photo.
layer
wall, roof and cellar
places, orientate, gap
All nine cubies related to a face are a layer. Layers can be turned (or rotated). We can make clockwise turns or anticlockwise turns of layers by 90 degrees. Layers are named by the corresponding face letter. Turning a layer means that the centre cubie just rotates and the 8 cubies around the centre go to different places.
There are inner layers as well, the layers between two opposite outer layers (they are called slices as well.) We will only turn outer layers, but I’ll refer to the layer between U and D as the second layer.
Sometimes things can be explained better if we view a cube like a house.
When we look at a cube placed on a table, we have four vertical layers that we call walls. The top layer U is the roof and the down layer D is the cellar
Any position a moving cubie can go to, we will call “place”. A cubie is at the right place only, if its stickers have the colours of the corresponding centres.
If a cubie is on the right place, but the colours do not match, we say it is wrongly orientated. A wrongly orientated edge at the right place needs to be flipped to become completely correct. A wrongly orientated corner needs to be turned. (A completely correct edge has to match the two centres it sits in between, a completely correct corner the three surrounding centres). A centre piece does not move, it is at the right place by definition. A place where a cubie is sitting, but not on its right place, we call gap.
naming of turns (or moves)
Clockwise turns by 90 degrees of the six layers are named: L, R, F, B, U, D
Anticlockwise turns of the six layers are: L’, R’, F’, B’, U’, D’
180 degree turns (no difference between clockwise and anticlockwise in this case) are: L2, R2, F2, B2, U2, D2
The 1st picture shows the turn R nearly completed, the second the move U
colour scheme
You could put the stickers in different order onto the six faces. Nowadays, the most popular scheme of colours is: white opposite yellow, green opposite blue, red opposite orange, where the white, red and green faces are in a clockwise order – as on the photos.
