Rubik’s Cube: How to quick solve?

Found the cube today lying deep in a rarely opened drawer in the house. Couldn’t put it down until I
could finish the solve. Trying to solve it took me back to my school going days when I learnt and solved
my first cube. My father introduced it to me and I just couldn’t help myself. Obsessed would be an
understatement.

Like how parents control TV time, Video games or Smartphone access to their kids nowadays, I was
banned from the cube. Looking back, it was in a way a good thing. I used to forget to eat, sleep, read, do
homework or any other chores while I had the cube.

Let’s learn how to solve it in a beginner friendly way. Later I will try explaining some more methods
(tricks) to get faster times.

Understanding the Rubik’s cube

The cube is made up of 3 types of pieces: Edges, Corners and Center pieces.

The centers cannot be moved in relation to other center pieces. You can try this yourself. Make moves
on any of the layers or the middle rows, but the centers never move relative to each other. This is how
the cube works. The centers form a structure (skeleton?) around which all the other pieces are
arranged.

The Edge pieces have 2 color blocks fixed, while the corners have 3 colors.

Imagine a 3d cube. In it there are 6 edges (straight lines), and 6 corners. Exactly like this, the Rubik’s
cube has 6 edge pieces and 6 corner pieces. Try moving around the pieces and getting a feel for how the
move. See how the edge pieces are different from the corner pieces, and how they both move around
the center pieces.

Now keep the cube on a table or a flat surface. If you see the cube from the top, you will see only the
top face. Seeing it from the side, you will see that there are 3 layers of blocks.

Solving a Rubik’s cube means to arrange all the pieces to align to each face. There are six faces and six
colors respectively for each face. The centers are fixed, so the edges have to align with their
corresponding 2 center color faces, and the corners are oriented and placed correctly at the junction of
3 center color faces.

Beginning to solve
We will fix the order of the solve. I am assuming the availability of the standard Rubik’s cube. And we
will start solving from the White face. The opposite face is yellow, and the other 4 colors are red, blue,
green, and orange.

Turn notation
Clockwise rotations of any face are notated as
Anticlockwise turns are notated with the same letters but followed by an apostrophe

A double turn is notated by a letter followed with the number ‘2’

Credits to ruwix.com for the icons and notation diagrams.

The white (+) plus (cross?)

First we have to get the white edges in place. Take care that the correct edge pieces are arranged at the
top, meaning the corresponding second color of each edge piece is matching with the second layer
center piece’s color.

First 2 layers
Now that the white edges are in place, we will intuitively solve the next bit. I am deliberately not giving
any algorithms based solutions here, but if you do want to try use this link: https://ruwix.com/the-
rubiks-cube/how-to-solve-the-rubiks-cube-beginners-method/step3-second-layer-f2l/

Here we try to match up one of the edge pieces with the corresponding white corner piece and then slot
the 2 piece block into the correct place. We will do the same for all the 4 combination blocks. Take care
of not disturbing the already correctly placed blocks. You can use the not yet done edges for moving
around the pieces. So if 2 edges and corners are correctly in place, then you have 2 edges for moving
around the pieces. It is like tying one hand behind the back and being forced to cook a meal. Difficult,
frustrating, not impossible. This will take some time to get our head around it, but eventually it does
become intuitive. Really.

Solving the Last layer

There are 4 steps we can break this down into.

Yellow plus
Depending upon the number of edges that have the yellow sides facing up, the below algorithm needs
to be repeated.
F R U R’ U’ F’

(see reading cube notations above if required)

Each time the algorithm is applied, you get one step ahead. Once you have all the yellow edges facing
up, you are done with this step.

Edge piece arrangement

Just like we arranged the edge pieces of the white face, we need to do the same for the yellow face. But
now there are other pieces which are solved that should not be disturbed in the first two layers. So the
below algorithm needs to be used.

This is the CFOP method or the Friedrich method of solving. CFOP stands for Center, First 2 layers, Orient
the last layer and then Permute the last layer.

References
https://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/how-to-solve-the-rubiks-cube-beginners-method/

Basic terminology: https://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/cubing-terminology-abbreviations-commonly-

used-expressions/