parity

Void Cube – Walk-Through, Re-Stickering

Adventures in Cubing

void-cubeIn my last post, I wrote about new custom stickers from Olivér Nagy. Besides some great new custom logo stickers, he and I worked on a sticker template for Rubik’s-brand Void Cubes. The OEM Void stickers have a ridiculous pattern of concentric circles and the color scheme is a bit funky — with white replaced by red and red replaced by a magenta-purple. Re‑stickering to a familiar color scheme made it a lot easier to solve!

As long as I had the camera rolling, I decided to do a quick walk-through video. A lot of folks think the Void Cube is some alien beast when it comes to solves. In reality, with one key parity exception, it solves just like a 3×3. The video walks through that parity issue, which is more fully explained after the jump.

(puzzle: Ruibk’s brand Void Cube w/ custom bright stickers from Olivér Nagy; music: “Ice Flow,” Kevin MacLeod, Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0)

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Parity or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 4×4

Adventures in Cubing7 Comments

After painstakingly modding my Shengshou v4s a couple months ago (mod post coming soon), my interest in 4x4s has waxed and waned. On the one hand, I find it a welcome and more challenging distraction from 3x3s; on the other hand, those damn parity algorithms!?! I have finally committed them to muscle memory and am now trotting along at a 2:20 average using the Yau variation of the reduction method. (For more on Yau, and especially the cross-on-right variation that I find easier, check out Cyoubx’ really good Yau intro video.)

For months, parity was my albatross. I finally conquered it, so to speak, not only by finding and learning algorithms that worked for me, but also my learning about the root causes of parity. This was by far my deepest dive into puzzle theory and its associated patois. Keep reading past the jump for much more on the types of cube parity, what causes each, and, most importantly, what we really mean when we sloppily say that a cube has “parity.”

PARITY ALGORITHMS

If you’re just here for the algorithms, look no further:

OLL Parity
4x4-oll-parity

[1] Rw U2 x Rw U2 Rw U2 Rw’ U2 Lw U2
Rw’ U2 Rw U2 Rw’ U2 Rw’

[2] (Rw Lw) U2 Lw’ U2 Rw’ U2′ x’ U2 Rw’ U2′ Rw U2 Rw’ U2′ Rw2 U2

 PLL Parity
4x4-pll-parity

Uw2 Rw2 U2 r2 U2 Rw2 Uw2

Here’s a (now muted due to copyright claims) video showing each:

(music: Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues“; cubes: Konsta+Florian modded Shengshou v4s with Cube Specialists Bright+ modded stickers)

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I Got 5 On It

Adventures in Cubing2 Comments

Go ahead and stream the below as your read this post. It’s my strained attempt to find some topical background music consistent with the post’s forced title. Maybe it’s just the introspection of turning 36, but it’s fun to hear an updated version of a song* that we used to listen to in high school.

* Wick-It Remix of the Luniz' “I Got Five On It,” with the opening minute or so cleaved and a line muted to keep things PG-13 around these parts….

So, I received my Shengshou 5×5 yesterday from amazon. I’m not really into higher order cubes, and certainly not into speed-solving them. But I guess that curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to test my theory that a 5×5 actually would be easier than a 4×4 for want of parity issues. I *hate* 4×4 last layer parity — with its long and confusing algorithms. Two 5×5 solves in, my theory seems mostly right.

shengshou 5x5
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