My original 3x3x3 solution

My "own" Solution of the Rubik's Cube

From 1978 to 1981 I was involved in the development of an Operating System for medium sized computers. I was based in Munich, but most of the development took place in Vienna, capital of Austria.

In 1979 two important things happened: My oldest daughter was born and a colleague from Vienna showed us the Rubik's Cube. He had Hungarian roots. had still family in Hungary and had bought it there. (For easy reference, I'll call him the "Hungarian" even when he was an Austrian citizen.)

Most of us got really interested and excited and asked, if he could get us such cubes. During the next weeks he built up a little business trading cubes to colleagues in Munich and Vienna. Nobody could solve it, though.

The "Hungarian" told us a little story about a rumour that only three guys worldwide could solve it. It was more a joke and the story went on in a bar, where most people believed that nobody could solve it and they made a bet with a stranger who actually solved and won.

In a first phase I could solve one layer and shortly after I was able to do the four edges in the second layer. With the third layer I got nowhere at that time.

A bit later the Hungarian told us that he had heard taking notes and watching closely what happened to specific "cubies" was essential for finding a solution. (Until then my approach was completely intuitive.)

Furthermore, breaking up the solved layers temporarily would be necessary. Not a tutorial, exactly!

So, I invented a "notation" based on the face colours and an abbreviation for something like "turn the yellow face by 90° clockwise". It took me two more weeks until I had solved the Cube for the first time.

So, I do not claim that I have found the solution on my own, but the vague hints from the Hungarian were no tutorial either. Yesterday, Tony Fisher released a video describing his own solution and today, May 25th 2015, I have found some of my old notes and decided to document my approach for myself and on my website. My notes are a later summary where I described 5 steps and 8 basic move sequences.

I had "improved" my notation by not longer using colours but A,B,C,a,b,c,1,2,3 for the nine vertical and horizontal layers. Still, my original notes are hard to understand (and German) and I'm going to use the usual Singmaster notation.

In December 1980 I saw the first article about a Cube solution in the German magazine "Bild der Wissenschaft".

They used a German version of the Singmaster notation and it was the first time that I understood the principles of a commutator ((R F' R' F)x2 was used to orientate the corners), but the term was probably not yet used.

In the German magazine "Spiegel" Nr. 4/1981 there was another detailed solution. At that time most kids in the Munich underground railway had a cube and the hype was at high tide.

Even most Munich climbers had one and we exchanged our knowledge when we got together for local training.

Books were written and I absorbed any information about the cube and its solutions I could get.

Therefore, my solution strategy is nowadays quite different from the original one.

When the 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 became available, I worked out my own solution.

Unfortunately, I lost all my early cubes in a fire in our house December 1983, four days before Christmas.

Here is a transcript and translation of my original solution.

1. First layer (I wrote then "uppermost ring") is easy

2. centres of the second Layer (I wrote "middle ring"): simple turn

3. Edges of the second layer

The basic idea was "replace stuff already solved by unsolved pieces, before doing the intended placement."

It was quite obvious, how I could replace the three pieces in the F layer solved already in the U layer by B2 U2 before doing the required F or F' turn placing the first edge at FL or FR.

But what if one of the edges in the F layer was placed already?

I came up with B R2 U as setup for an F turn an then I reversed the 3 turns. (I have learnt 3 decades later that this is called a "conjugate".) The whole sequence is B, R2, U, F, U', R2, B' which I called T1 for "Transaction 1". Performed on a solved cube this results in

T2 was the mirrored version = B' L2 U' F' U L2 B.

4. Placing the edges in the third layer

This step and the following was clearly part of my second phase when I had started taking notes using my strange notation.

My notes from 1979 contain nothing about orientating these last edges. It was quite obvious to me when I wrote these notes, that I would orientate the last layer edges while placing the middle layer edges.

Actually, this is really simple using my sequence above.

I found a 3 cycle, something that was called later "Antisune" by Lars Petrus.

T3: R', D2, R, D, R', D, R

The basic idea was "move two solved pieces into the D layer and let them return jointly in a little bit different way".

T4 was T3 mirrored = L, D'2, L', D', L, D', L'.

5. Last corners

a. Placing them

It was a major breakthrough when I detected that taking out a middle layer edge by T1 and putting it back by D' T1 made a pure 3 cycle of the last corners

T5: T1 U' T1 U' = B,R'2, U, F, U', R'2, B', D', B, R'2, U, F, U', R'2, B', D'