The Rubik User’s Guide

Tom Davis
[email protected]
http://www.geometer.org
May 10, 2003

1 Introduction
The program Rubik allows you to manipulate a virtual 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube. It runs on either a
Mac (running OS X, version 10.2.4 or later) or a PC and provides the following features:

• Manipulate the cube (twist faces, slices, and the whole cube, and undo your twists).
• Jumble the cube.
• Reset the cube to solved.
• Solve a jumbled cube (whether it was jumbled by you or by the computer).
• Enter your own cube configuration (to find a solution for your own physical cube, for
example).
• Define and apply macros. Macros are sets of twists grouped together and assigned a name
so that the set of moves can be applied as a unit.
• Determine the order of a macro. The order of a macro is the number of times you need to
repeat the macro from a solved cube to return to a solved cube.
• Run the program in a mesmerizing demo mode.

The Rubik program is based in part on the work of the FLTK project (http://www.fltk.org)—a
darned good piece of software.

2 Basic Cube Manipulation

If the cube turns too quickly or too slowly, see the description of the Speed button in the
description of the commands in Section 12.
To run the program, just double-click the Rubik program icon. You should see a window some-
thing like that in figure 1 (except that the displayed cube will not be jumbled when the program
starts).
Two cubes are visible—the large one can be manipulated and the smaller one is a view of the
back of the same cube. Remember that it is truly a back view—the blue side is the right face and
the orange side is the back face.

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 Figure 1: Rubik Window

To rotate a face 90 degrees clockwise (as you look at that face) click on the center cubie 1 on
that face with the mouse. If you hold the shift key down while you click on a face, it rotates
90 degrees counter-clockwise. To obtain a half turn, simply click two times on the face’s center
cubie.
In general, if the shift key is down, the inverse operation is performed. For example, if a com-
mand rotates the entire cube right, that same command with the shift key down will rotate the
entire cube to the left and so on. This is nice in that if you screw up a movement, you can almost
always hold the shift key down and “repeat your mistake” to undo it.
If you hold down the control key while you click on the center cubie of a face, the entire cube
turns 90 degrees clockwise. If you hold both the control and shift keys down when you click,
the entire cube is rotated by 90 degrees counter-clockwise.
If you hold down the alt key while you click on the center cubie of a face, the center slice parallel
to that face turns 90 degrees clockwise. If you hold both the alt and shift keys down when you
click, that same center slice is rotated by 90 degrees counter-clockwise.
Finally if you hold down both the control and alt keys, the face opposite is turned 90 degrees
from the point of view of the face you clicked on. For example, if you click on the front face with
the control and alt keys down, the back face will rotate clockwise as it appears on the screen.
Remember, however, that if you were looking directly at the back face, this would appear to be
a counter-clockwise twist. As before, the addition of the shift key reverses the direction of the
1 The name “cubie” applies to any of the smaller outer cubes that make up the entire 3 × 3 × 3 cube.

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turn.
To undo moves, use the Undo entry in the Edit pull-down menu or type the control-Z shortcut.
You can issue undo commands repeatedly and each undoes one move. (If you just want to undo
a single move, it’s usually easier just to repeat whatever you did three more times (or repeat it
once with the shift key down) since then you don’t have to move the mouse to find the Undo
menu entry or reach for the keyboard to type control-Z.)
All of these operations can also be applied with buttons in the control area to the right of the
window. As before, if the shift key is down, the movements are reversed.
Finally, there are shortcut keys for any of the basic face movements (not the slice or whole-cube
movements, however). If you hold down the alt key and type “f”, “r”, “d”, “l”, “b” or “u” then
the front, right, down, et cetera face is turned 90 degrees clockwise. If the shift key is down,
then that face is turned counter-clockwise.

3 Cube Coordinates and Move Descriptions

Although at first glance, it seems like it might be best to describe elements of a cube by their
colors, this is not a good idea for two reasons:

1. Different cubes with different manufacturers have different arrangements of the face col-
ors.
2. If you’ve learned a sequence of moves that, for example, exchanges two adjacent cor-
ners, this same operation can be applied to any pair of adjacent corners. A color-based
description would only apply to one pair.

If you hold a cube in front of you with one face toward the ceiling and looking directly at another
face, there are six faces altogether that we will call “Up”, “Down”, “Left”, “Right”, “Back” and
“Front”. In the intial cube configuration the default face colors of Rubik has the white face
“Up”, the red face “Front” and the green face “Left”. Although you cannot see them except in
the rear view, the blue face is “Right”, the orange face is “Back”, and the yellow face is “Down”.
If your cube is not arranged like this, you can reset the cube colors so that the program’s cube
will look like your physical cube. See Section 10.
These names of the faces are fairly standard, and they are abbreviated by their first letters which
are luckily all different: B F U D L R. The other great thing about the names is that the letters in
the order above almost spell “befuddler” of which the cube surely is one.
To help avoid errors, the Front, Left and Up faces are labeled with the letters “F”, “L” and “U”
on the computer display.
The buttons in the control area refer to these coordinates. For example, the button labeled Dcw
means to turn the Down face 90 degrees clockwise. That’s clockwise when you are looking at
the middle of the Down face. Similarly, Bccw means turn the back face 90 degrees counter-
clockwise (as you look at it—if you’re viewing from the front, it appears to be a clockwise
move2). The button marked RScw means to look at the right face and turn the center slice 90
2 If you are manipulating a physical cube, an easy way to keep clockwise and counter-clockwise straight is to remem-

ber that to get a clockwise move of a face, grasp it with the right hand and turn it in the direction pointed to by the right

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degrees clockwise. Finally, the UCcw means to look directly at the Up face and turn the entire
cube 90 degrees clockwise. Remember that if the shift key is held down when any of these
buttons are pressed, the movement is in the opposite direction. (If you are befuddled by this
paragraph, just try clicking on the faces with various combinations of shift, control and alt and
clicking on the buttons in the control area with and without the shift key and it will become
clear.)
Note that there’s no need for counter-clockwise
slice or whole-cube moves; BScw is the same as
turning the Front slice counter-clockwise and sim- UB
URB
UR
ilarly for whole-cube moves. You can also hold ULB U URF

down the shift key to get the reverse movement. ULB

UL UF
ULF URF
The cube appears to be made of 27 smaller “cu- UL
UF
bies”, of which you can see the 26 outer ones. LB
ULF ULF

(There really is no center cubie, but that doesn’t RF

L F
matter.) There are three kinds of visible cubies:
LF
corner cubies with three colors (there are eight DLB LF
DRF

of these), edge cubies with two colors (there are DL

DF

twelve of these) and face cubies with one color DLF

DLF
(there are six of these).
A cubie can be identified by the three, two or one
colors (or better, by the three, two or one faces.
The UFR cubie is the corner cubie in the upper-
front-right. The LD cubie is an edge cube on the Figure 2: CubedownCoordinates

left-down edge. The R cubie is the center cubie on

the right face. See figure 2.
With the default cube as displayed in the program, the LUF cube is the one with the green, white
and red faces showing. (It’s the only corner cubie all of whose faces are visible on the large
cube.) The three edge cubies next to it are the white-red (UF), white-green (UL) and green-red
(LF) cubies.
If you are just talking about a particular cubie whose orientation is unimportant, then the order
of the letters does not matter: URF, UFR, RUF, RFU, FUR and FRU would refer to the same
cubie. If you wish to describe a transformation exactly it can be done by paying careful attention
to the order of the letters. For example, a transformation that flips the UL and UF cubies in place
(in other words, the cubes stay in the same locations on the cube, but the colors are exchanged)
might be written like this:

(U L, U F ) → (LU, F U ) or (U L)(U F )

where the notation indicates that the cubies stay in the same locations, but the faces are flipped.
The second possibility is in “cycle notation” where each element in a pair of parentheses is
assumed to move to the element to the right and the rightmost returns to the first element. Since
there is only a single face, it’s clear that the notation refers to a cubie that stays in place but
changes orientation.
thumb.

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In the same way, a transformation that rotates a pair of corner cubies in place might be written:

(U F L, U F R) → (LU F, RU F ) or (U F L)(U F R).

Finally, a transformation that cycles three edge cubies RF to UF, UF to FL and FL to RF might
be written:

(RF, U F, F L) → (U F, F L, RF ) or simply (RF U L F L).

You can find this cycle form of the permutation that will take a solved cube to the one displayed
on your screen by using the Display Permutation command in the File pull-down menu. The
permutation is displayed in a window that pops up.
The permutation of the cube is displayed in two forms. The first indicates how the cubies move
on the cube. This is the way most people think about cube permutations, but it cannot completely
represent the situation. We can indicate the how a face is rotated or flipped if it is in its original
location, or we can indicate how the individual cubies move into their slots, but not both. Here,
if the cubies move, the permutation indicates the cycling of the cubie locations. If a cubie stays
in one place, the permutation indicates how the faces of that cubie are rotated or flipped. For
example, (RU F ) indicates that the cubie is in and remains in the right-up-front corner, but that
the right face moves to the up face, the up face to the front face, and the front face back to the
right face. However, (RF U F F L) simply tells us that those three cubies cycle in the manner
shown, but it gives no indication of whether they are flipped or not.
To obtain a complete description of the permutation, we need to know where each of the 54 faces
move. Well, actually only 48 of them, since we consider the center cubies on each face to stay
in place. The second form of the permutation displayed indicates this. Each corner cubie (like
RU F ) has three faces. For that example, Rubik uses Ruf to indicate the face on the right, U rf
for the up face, and F ur for the front face of that same cubie. Similarly for the edge cubies.
After each of the two cycle notations listed above is an indication of the cycle structure. In that
structure, a term like 3(4) means there are 3 cycles of length 4. Cycles of length 1 are generally
not listed since they indicate that an object stays in place, but in the case of the cubie permutation,
1-cycles indicate the number of cubes that stay in place but are flipped or rotated. For details
you can always look at the cubie face cycle notation.

4 Solving the Cube with Macros

A “macro” is simply a series of twists considered to be a single operation. If, for example, you
turn the front face twice by 90 degrees and then the left face twice by 90 degrees, that would be
a four-move macro. This is not a particularly useful macro, but it will serve as a good example.
Try this out: Press the Reset Cube button to initialize the cube, and then click twice on the front
center cubie (the red one) and then twice on the left center cubie (the green one). The cube looks
a bit jumbled, but it’s still quite regular. (The shortcut for Reset Cube is control-R.)
Now repeat the operation again (Front, Front, Left, Left) so that now you’ve done 8 total quarter-
turns. The cube is still mixed up, but it’s not that much worse. Repeat the four quarter-turns one

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more time (for twelve total turns) and the cube is almost solved. If you examine the cube’s front
and rear views, you should be able to see that there are only four cubies out of place. Now do
the entire four-move macro three more times (that’s twelve more total twists), and if you didn’t
make any mistakes, the cube returns to its “solved” configuration. Pretty neat, huh?
It’s a little inconvient to do four clicks each time you want to apply this macro, so let’s see how
to do it more easily.
There is a macro language that describes the steps in a macro, and it’s fairly straight-forward:

• B, F, U, D, L, R: 90c irc clockwise move of the corresponding face.

• b, f, u, d, l, r: 90◦ counter-clockwise move of the corresponding face.
• *B, *F, *U, *D, *L, *R: 90◦ clockwise slice move.
• >B, >F, >U, >D, >L, >R: 90◦ whole-cube move.

To construct a macro, just cram together the appropriate letters in a string. Your “Front Front
Left Left” macro is just:

FFLL

Let’s see how to use it. First, click on Reset Cube to initialize the cube.
Click on the empty Current Macro input box (if it’s not empty, simply select all the text in it
and type the delete key). Next, type in “FFLL” (without the quotation marks, of course). If you
now press the return key on your keyboard, the macro is applied, and you can watch the faces
rotate.
Notice that just above the right end of the Current Macro input box is an output area that lists
the length in steps of the macro. This can be valuable if you want to find macros that accomplish
various tasks in the minimum number of steps.
In fact, if you press the return key again, the macro is repeated. Thus, clicking on the return
key six times will do exactly the same thing that your 24 individual moves did previously.
If you are in a hurry, click on the Apply Macro button in the control area, and the macro is
simply applied to the cubies and all you see is the final result—you don’t need to wait for them
to turn for you. Try that—with the same FFLL in the macro window (from a reset cube) click the
Apply Macro button 6 times to see how it works. The shortcut for Apply Macro is control-A.
Now let’s see how macros can be extremely useful for solving a cube. Reset the cube (with the
Reset Cube button) if it is not already, and click on the “Flip UF UL” entry in the menu button
labeled Defined Macros .
Two things happen. First, whatever you had in the Current Macro area is replaced by this 14-
step macro:

FRBLUlUbrfluLu

In addition, the cube is modified to represent the result after these 14 moves have been applied.
As you can see, this macro might be very useful for a solution. Any time you have two adjacent

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edge cubies that are in the correct spots, but flipped to the wrong orientation, you could place the
cube as shown on the screen and apply those 14 moves with the result that your two edge cubies
would be flipped in place.
Click on the “Flip UF UL” choice button again and the macro is applied a second time, returning
the cube to its initial configuration.
Now click in the Current Macro area where you previously typed in the FFLL and type the
return key. This time the 14 steps are applied one at a time so you can see what happens to the
cube as you step through the macro. Any time you want to watch a macro occur, click in that
Current Macro area and either enter your own macro definition or use one that’s there and then
press the return key to step through it. If you hold down the shift key when you press return,
the inverse of the macro will be applied to the cube. In other words, if you start with a solved
cube, then execute a macro, then hold down the shift key and press the return key again, the
cube will be returned to a solved state.
The Apply Macro button is also inverted if the shift key is down when it is pressed.
There are a few other macros stored in that list by default. To try others, click down in the
Defined Macros menu choice button, drag the mouse to be above the one you want, and release
the mouse button. That macro will be applied as well as entered in the Current Macro area.
To get a good idea of what each does, initialize the cube with the Reset Cube button before you
try each one. All are useful tools that might be used to solve a cube (real or virtual).

4.1 Defining Your Own Macros

If you have found a useful set of moves that you would like to be able to reuse, type it into the
Current Macro area, test it to be sure it does what you want, and then click on the Define Macro
entry in the Macros pull-down menu. A text entry window will come up, allowing you to name
your macro, and when you’ve named it, it will appear in the list of macros.
As soon as you define a new macro, it is written into the preferences file so that from then on,
when you start Rubik, you will have those macros automatically defined for you.
To delete a macro from the list in Defined Macros , click on the Delete Macro entry in the
Macros pull-down menu. Then type in the name of the macro (exactly as it is in the list,
including spaces), and the macro will be deleted, not only from the current list, but also from
the preferences file if you wish. Notice that the default name for the macro to delete is the last
one you used, so the quickest way to delete a particular macro is to use it and then delete it. If
you don’t want to alter the cube by applying the macro, simply apply the macro and then apply
it again with the shift key down. This will do and undo the macro action for no net effect.
You can delete any of the macros, and if the one you delete is one you defined, Rubik will ask
you if you want to delete it from the preferences file as well. You can also delete the macros that
appear in Rubik by default, but they will reappear the next time you run the program.
In addition, the command Delete All Macros gets rid of all the macros in the choice button.
This does not delete any of the macros you defined from the preferences file.
Remember that if you applied your FFLL macro three times, it did something fairly simple—it
exchanged two sets of edge cubies and left everything else in place. This might actually be useful
for cube solution, and so you could create a macro that does the twelve turns by typing in:

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 FFLLFFLLFFLL

and defining a macro. But there’s a simpler way. Just type:

3(FFLL)

A number before a pair of parentheses says to repeat the stuff inside the parentheses that number
of times. Again, here it’s a bit of overkill to use it, but try typing 3(FFLL) into the Current Macro
area, test it, name it, and use it.
In fact, such grouping can be nested. Again, this is harder than doing it in the straightforward
manner, but the following represents the same macro:

3(2(F)2(L))

Obviously, for more complex situations, this may save a lot of time.
Remember that you can use upper-case letters for counter-clockwise moves, and you can include
slice and whole-cube moves in your macros. Here’s a valid macro (not useful, but valid):

3(f>DRR*Uu3(RF)2(FU))rfr21(FRFuud)

If you type junk like that into the Current Macro area and press the return key, it’ll give you a
“show”. In this case, the macro above results in 177 individual moves. Do you see why?
We noticed that if you repeat the sequence FFLL six times from an initialized cube, the cube is
returned to “solved”. What is interesting is that every macro has similar behavior: if you repeat it
enough times from a solved cube, the cube will return to solved. The minimum number of times
required to return to the “solved” configuration is called the “order” of the macro. The order of
FFLL is thus 6.
Rubik allows you to find the order of any macro. Type the macro into the Current Macro input
area and press the Macro Order button. The result is displayed in a window. Try entering FFLL
in the Current Macro area, press Macro Order and see that the result is 6.
If you enter just FL, the order is 105—probably larger than you thought. You can easily verify
that 105 repetitions of the FL macro returns to “solved” by resetting the cube, typing 105FLl)
into the Current Macro area, and then pressing the Apply Macro button. (It’s a little tougher
to verify that 105 is the minimum number of applications of the macro required to return to
solved—you’ll just have to trust Rubik.)
Being able to find the order of a macro is useful for solving cubes since if the order of a macro
has divisors, going only half-way or a third of the way through a macro often has useful results.
For example, if you initialize the cube and try the combination FLfl, it moves 7 total cubies—
not too useful for solving a cube. But if you type it into the Current Macro area and press the
Macro Order button, you’ll see that the order is 6. If you now try the macro 3(FLfl) you’ll see
that it swaps two pairs of corner cubies, and that might be useful.

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4.2 The Macro Gizmo
Sometimes you would like to have a set of macros all available at the touch of a button. Rubik
can display a macro window where you can define up to 16 such macros. All the macros in the
gizmo must be defined macros.
The gizmo holds up to 16 macros. You can enter more, but only the first 16 are displayed.
To enter a macro into the gizmo, use the Add Macro to Gizmo entry in the Macros pull-down
window. Enter the name of the macro you would like to add in the window that pops up. The
default name in that window is the macro currently visible in the Defined Macros choice area.
As soon as you’ve added a macro, the macro gizmo appears with the new macro name listed on
a button. Pressing this button is the same as clicking on the name in the Defined Macros area,
including the feature that if the shift key is down, the inverse of that macro is applied.
To delete a macro from the gizmo, use Delete Macro from Gizmo in the Macros pull-down
menu. This does not delete it from the set of defined macros—only from the gizmo.
If you have closed the macro gizmo window, you can re-open it with the Show Macro Gizmo
button in the View pull-down menu. If there are no macros in the gizmo, it will not be displayed.
This gizmo is useful when you are running experiments with a restricted set of moves. For
example, suppose you would like to see what positions can be achieved using only the three
slice moves. Put each one in a macro and enter exactly those three into the gizmo. Then click
only on the gizmo buttons. Hint: if you move the gizmo to sit on top of the control area of
Rubik’s window, you won’t accidentally use any of the normally-available buttons by accident.
To clear the macro gizmo, use the Clear Macro Gizmo command in the Macros pull-down
menu.
If (and only if) the macro you add to the gizmo is one that is in your preferences file, a change
will be made to your preferences file so that it will be loaded into the gizmo each time you
start up Rubik. If you delete this macro from the macro gizmo, the preferences file will be
changed so that it is not automatically loaded into the gizmo on startup. You can temporarily add
macros to the gizmo from the default startup set or from macro files that you have loaded, but
that information is lost the next time you start up Rubik. If you really want one of those macros
in the gizmo permanently, define your own copy of it and put that in the gizmo. Remember
that if the macro string in a file that you load begins with the character “$”, then the macro is
automatically loaded into the gizmo when the file is loaded.

4.3 Singmaster Notation

David Singmaster was one of the first people to publish a booklet on Rubik’s cube, and he used
a notation that is different from that used in Rubik. If you search on the web you will find many
interesting macros described in this so-called Singmaster notation, so Rubik has the ability to
interpret it.
Singmaster’s notation is quite simple. It consists of a string of space-separated entries that look
like this: U, U’, U2, R, R’, R2, et cetera. The Singmaster U is Rubik’s U, the U’ is Rubik’s u
and finally, U2 is Rubik’s UU. Similarly for the other 5 faces/letters.
To enter a macro in Singmaster notation, simply surround it with brackets when you type or

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paste it into the Current Macro area, as follows:

[ U D R2 L’ B F’ U2 ]

As you type it into the Current Macro input area (or paste it in with control-V key) nothing
happens until you type return or click on the Apply Macro button. At that point the Singmaster
notation is translated to the Rubik notation and the contents of the input area are changed to be
in Rubik format, at which point you can do anything you like with them.
To copy text from the Current Macro area, select it and type control-C. To cut it, type control-
X.

5 Recording Macros
If you press the Record On button in the control area, Rubik will record your cube movements
in the Current Macro input area. It uses exactly the same syntax to record the moves, and once
the text is in that input area, it can be used like any other macro.
Doing almost anything other than making movements will get you out of this recording mode
(but will leave the macro in the Current Macro input area). If you want to force Rubik out of
recording mode, click on the same button (whose name has changed to Record Off ).
The Undo command (in the Edit pull-down menu) will erase the last entry in the Macro window
as well as undoing the operation.

6 Macros from a File

If you would like to use different sets of macros for different runs of the Rubik program (perhaps
you are writing a tutorial that uses the program, for example), you can do so. Create a text file
with pairs of lines that contain first the name, then the macro itself. For example, such a file
might look like this:
Three face twist
rld
Junk-filled macro
fuD>R*Duud*U*R*U
Striped Cube
[ D’ F D’ L B D2 F2 U R B’ U R2 F D’ R F U2 ]

This example would define a macro called “Three face twist” to be RLD and another macro
called “Junk-filled macro” to be fuD>R*Duud*U*R*U. Finally, a third macro called “Striped
Cube” is defined in Singmaster notation. Suppose this file is called rubikmacs.rub.
If the macro string begins with the character “$”, that macro will also be added to the macro
gizmo. See Section 4.2
To put the macros from a file into the Defined Macros area, use the Load Macro File entry in
the File pull-down menu. A file browser will appear that you can use to navigate to the proper

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directory and select the file rubikmacs.rub. The macros above will be added to your list of
defined macros for the current session only. These macros are not stored in the preferences file,
so they will disappear the next time you run Rubik and will have to be reloaded again if you
want to use them again.
Currently Rubik does no checking to make sure that the names of macros are distinct. It’s up to
you to keep them organized. If you accidentally get a duplicate name, you can always delete it,
although it’s not clear which one will be deleted.
Included with the release is a file called patterns.rub that contains a number of macros that
produce pretty patterns if they are applied to an initialized cube. Give some of them a try.
If you’ve got some macros that you developed within Rubik and would like to save them, the
command Dump Macro File in the File pull-down menu allows you to specify a file name and
all of the currently-defined macros are dumped there. You’ll have to sort out the mess with a text
editor, assuming you only want a few of them.

7 Demo Mode
Make sure that the Current Macro area is empty and press the Start Demo button. You’ll get an
interesting display. To stop the demo, click on the same button (whose name has been changed
to Stop Demo ). If you find the “orbiting” small rear-view of the cube annoying, you can toggle
it on and off with the Show Rear Cube entry in the View pull-down menu.
If the Current Macro area is empty, demo mode creates a random macro and repeats it endlessly,
so it’s guaranteed to come back to “solved” again and again. The macro it picks will return to
solved in a reasonable number of turns (fewer than 300).
If the Current Macro area is not empty when you press the Start Demo button, the program
initializes the cube and endlessly applies the macro entered there. Thus if you find a macro that
goes though pleasing states, you can probably make a nicer demo than what the program is likely
to come up with by itself (but sometimes Rubik will surprise you). You might try demo mode
with some of the macros in the file patternmacs.rub.
If Rubik makes up a macro for use in demo mode, it puts it in the Current Macro display area
so in case it stumbles across a good one, you can save it.

8 Jumbling and finding Rubik’s Solution

If you want to practice solving jumbled cubes, simply press the Jumble button and you’ll get a
completely jumbled cube that you can try to solve with a combination of edge moves and macros.
(If you pry apart your cube with a screwdriver, mix the pieces, and assemble it with your eyes
closed, you have one chance in twelve of obtaining a solvable cube.)
Of course it’s pretty easy for you to mix up the virtual cube hopelessly yourself with a few
random clicks on the buttons in the control area.
If you want the program to solve a cube for you, Simply click on the Solve Cube button. It may
take a while. The first time you do this, there is also an initialization that occurs that also takes

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time. (On my dual processor 1.25 GHz Power Mac, it takes perhaps fifteen seconds to find the
solution for an “average” cube (including initialization). On my old 400 MHz PC, it takes about
60 seconds.)
The solution appears in the Current Macro area. You can either make those moves yourself or
click in the Current Macro area and press the return key to watch the program solve the cube.
Don’t simply click on the Apply Macro button—that would just be the equivalent of pressing
the Reset Cube button, right?
By the way, you can convince yourself that Rubik really is solving the cube and not just watch-
ing the turns you make as you jumble it and reversing those. Try starting with an initialized cube,
make about 50 moves, and then click on Solve Cube . It will certainly find a solution that has
fewer than 50 quarter-twists (Rubik’s solution is typically between 25 and 30 moves).
When you press the Solve Cube button, Rubik spends a “reasonable” amount of time looking
for a good solution. If you’d like to have it spend more time and make it look for a better solution,
there are two entries in the Edit pull-down menu: Long Solve and Very Long Solve . If these
are toggled on, Rubik will spend more time and much more time searching for a solution. Even
if Rubik is in one of these modes, a solution may not take longer—if Rubik is convinced that
it has the best solution, the search can end early. You can convince yourself that this is true by
making, say, three quarter-turns on a solved cube and then clicking on the Solve Cube button in
Very Long Solve mode.

9 Solving a Physical Cube

If your plastic cube is jumbled and you’re too stupid to solve it yourself and too lazy to take out
the screwdriver to break it apart and then reassemble it, here’s a way to solve it without wracking
your brain too much.
Enter your cube’s configuration into the program and use the Solve Cube facility described
above. When you see the macro in the window, manually apply that to your own cube by
physically turning the sides, and there you are! Be sure that your cube is in the same orientation
as the cube on the screen before you begin to apply the moves or you’ll wind up with a cube
that’s simply jumbled in a different way.
To make sure you are following the macro exactly on your physical cube, especially when you
are a beginner, you can use the left-arrow and right-arrow keys to single-step forward and
backward through the macro. Thus, the safest way to solve your cube is to make one or two
physical moves, then single-step the macro the same number of steps and compare the results. If
they are different, you are at most a couple of moves away from the path to the correct solution.
Remember that you can back up on the screen as well with the left-arrow key.
You can find the number of steps in the solution by looking at the “Macro length” output area
above the Current Macro input area. If the macro doesn’t make sense (or is incomplete because
you haven’t finished typing it in), then “*****” will be displayed as its length.
Remember, however, that one screw-up in the middle will totally trash everything and you’ll
have to start again.
All you need to know now is how to enter your cube’s color configuration into the program.

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For now, I will assume your cube has the same colors as those in the default cube (which,
surprisingly, are the same as those on my personal physical cube).
But here’s how it works with my cube (which is pretty standard, I think).
My cube’s colors are Orange, Red, Green, Blue, White and Yellow. The first letters are all
distinct, so I’ll call them O, R, G, B, W and Y.
If the red center cubie is facing me and the white center cubie is up, then “Back” is orange,
“Right” is blue, “Left” is green, and “Down” is yellow. If the cube were made of just a cardboard
shell, and painted as in the “solved” configuration, you could cut it along various of its edges
and unwrap it to look like this:
W
G R B O
Y
(The figure above represents a configuration where the white face is on top, the red is facing
you, the yellow is facing down, the green face is to the left, et cetera, just as in the default
configuration on Rubik’s display.)
Now, Imagine that you again cut the cube as above, but this time draw out each face with the
nine colors that make it up. When you do that, each of the letters in the pattern above would
really represent 9 colors.
To enter your cube, click on the Input Cube button and a window like that shown in figure 3
will appear.

Figure 3: Set Cube Gizmo

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One of the entries is highlighted (when you begin, it’s the one in the upper-left corner of the
“Up” face). At the bottom of the window is a set of color buttons. If you click on one of those,
the color of the selected cubie face changes to be that color and the selected cubie face advances
one. If you just want to change a few colors, you can click on a cubie face to make it the selected
one, and continue from there. In addition, you can type the space and backspace keys to move
the selected cubie forward or back without changing the colors. When you are satisfied with the
cube coloring, click on the Finish button.
Make sure especially not to screw up the back—when it’s “unwrapped” it goes the “other way”.
If you have any doubts about how this works, the cube displayed in figure 1 is the same as the
one displayed unwrapped in figure 3.
When you finish setting colors, Rubik does a “sanity check” on the cube colors to make sure
you have the right number of cubies colored in a way that the cube can be solved. If you do not,
Rubik displays an error dialog and returns you to the input gizmo. If you just can’t figure out
how to fix your cube, press the Reset button in the gizmo and the cube will revert to a solved
state.
If the cube in the input gizmo is invalid for some reason, that reason will be presented in the text
output area in the lower-left part of the window. Rubik will list in that window one thing that
is wrong. There may be many problems, but as you fix each, the next appears in that window.
When it is completely valid, the text in that window will be “Valid Cube”.
The gizmo also contains a Flip/Rotate button. If you press this, the currently-selected cubie will
flip (if it’s an edge) or rotate (if it’s a corner). Rotation is always in the same direction, so if you
want to rotate in the opposite direction, just click on the button twice.

10 Setting Cube Colors

If your cube’s colors don’t match the default colors, you can change the default color settings.
Here are the colors currently recognized by Rubik, and their one-letter abbreviations (which can
be in lower-case as well):

R: red W: white B: blue Y: yellow G: green

O: orange S: silver K: black V: violet P: pink
D: gold M: magenta X: gray C: cyan

To specify a coloring, list the letters corresponding to your cube’s colors in the following order:
Up Left Front Right Back Down
The defaut colors are thus: WGRBOY. If your cube is red on top, white on the bottom, black in
front, pink in the rear, magenta on the left and gold on the right, your color pattern would be:
RMKDPX. These are the letters and colors that will be displayed on the screen and on the gizmo
that lets you enter cube configurations.
To change these default colors, press the Set Cube Colors entry in the View pull-down menu.
Then enter your six-character string in the input window that appears. From then on, (until you
set the colors again in the same way) Rubik will use that color scheme. When you set the colors,
the result is also written into the preferences file.

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 11 Printing the Current Cube
In the File pull-down menu is an entry: Print EPS File . This will cause Rubik to produce an
encapsulated PostScript file that displays the current front face of the cube. You can use this in
any way you want.

12 Button Reference
What follows is a short description of the actions of each of the command buttons in the control
area and menu entries in the pull-down menu. One hopes that the actions of the face-turning
buttons are obvious. The buttons are listed in alphabetical order.

Add Macro to Gizmo adds a previously defined macro to the macro gizmo.
Apply Macro applies the contents of the Current Macro input area to the cube instantly, without letting
you see the individual moves.
Clear Macro Gizmo empties the macro gizmo.
Define Macro lets you assign a name to the contents of the Current Macro area and the (name, macro)
pair is placed in the Defined Macros menu button.
Delete All Macros deletes all the macros in the Defined Macros list. It does not delete any macros from your
preferences file.
Delete Macro deletes a macro in the Defined Macros list. If that macro is in your preferences file, you
will be asked if you want to delete it from there as well.
Delete Macro from Gizmo deletes a macro from the macro gizmo. This has no effect on the currently defined macros.
Display Permutation displays in cycle format the permutation required to bring a solved cube to the current
configuration.
Dump Macro File writes the macro definitions in a form that Rubik can read into a file whose name is
specified by the user.
Help is currently a pitiful place-holder for something better in a future release.

Input Cube allows you to enter your cube’s colors into the program for test manipulation or solution.

Jumble Cube creates a solvable jumbled cube.

Load Macro File loads a set of macros from a file.

Long Solve increases the amount of time that Rubik will spend looking for a good solution. This
button can be toggled on and off.
Macro Order determines the order of the macro in the Current Macro area.

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 Print EPS File produces and encapsulated PostScript file of the front face of the current cube configura-
tion.
Record On starts recording movements in the Current Macro input area. When in recording mode,
this key changes to be Record Off .
Reset Cube initializes the cube to “solved” and empties the undo buffer.
Set Cube Speed sets the speed at which the faces turn. Smaller numbers represent faster turning. The
number you type in is the number of steps during a turn. If your graphics is pretty good
(as of 2003) a speed of about 80 is good. On ancient machines or bad graphics, a 10 or
even 5 might be the way to go. When you set the speed, the new value is stored in the
preferences file. Set the speed to whatever pleases you.
Set Cube Colors sets the default colors on the faces of a solved cube.
Show Macro Gizmo displays the macro gizmo window.
Show Rear Cube toggles on and off the rear cube view.
Solve Cube solves the current cube configuration. A macro representing the solution is then entered
into the Current Macro area. You can type return to watch it solve automatically or you
can single-step it with the right-arrow key, which is probably the best approach if you’re
using Rubik to solve a physical cube.
Start Demo enters demo mode. On entry, the button changes to Stop Demo .

Quit quits the program.

Undo undoes one quarter-twist.

Very Long Solve dramatically increases the amount of time that Rubik will spend looking for a good solu-
tion. This button can be toggled on and off.

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