That’s exactly how I always solved it, though I never used a hammer to get it apart… I just pried at a corner untl I got it off.

To solve it the conventional way you “just” need to know some rules as to which transformations will swap each type of pair of locations. Then some general strategy will do the rest. For you mathies out there, these transformations can be represented as group actions. Way cool.

I taught myself how to solve a cube. I was never very good at it, but I could do it. There are pages out there if you’re interested.

That’s pretty damn impressive.

Believe it or not, it was actually my youngest brother who taught me how to solve the Rubik’s Cube three years ago. I had yearned for the ability to master the task for years, but for whatever reason I was never able to figure it out on my own.

When Middle Son was 7 years old, I had him with me at a meeting.  He had promised to be really good, he had a little bag of toys and a book to keep him occupied.
There was a Rubik’s cube sitting on a table in the corner, and he asked if he could work with it.

The hostess answered yes, and we grownups didn’t hear from him the whole time we were busy.
As we were finishing up, my son walked over to the hostess and showed her the cube with all sides having their colors complete.
“Is This how it is supposed to look?” he asked.

Seven adult jaws dropped open in amazement.

The kid has now earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematical Research with a 3.16 gpa (while working 40 hours a week) and has been accepted into three PhD programs (pretty much skipping a Master’s).

Some brains do work differently.
The rest of us can only stand and cheer them on.

There is another way to solve the rubiks cube - melt the glue with a hairdryer and rearrange the stickers.

Things like solving the rubiks cube depend on having a virtually photographic memory in addition to problem solving. These are very specific abilities and is not a general measure of intelligence. Indeed I believe that there is no real measure because there are so many components and complicating (environmental) factors that casts doubt on the true validity of all methods.

I’m not even convinced that as a concept inteligence actually exists (as commonly thought at least)- if you break it down to individual skills then ability in those might be dependant entirely on conditions (such as frame of mind and what you’ve experienced) and how much time you have dedicated. How much you choose to dedicate is based on frame of mind. You could say that animals are wired differently from each other even within the same species, but brain wiring changes with environmental input and lack in one area means redistribution to another - people who lose a sense often gain in others, and brain damaged people can have improved skills. Nobody really fully taps into their skills because conditions are such that it may be impossible and you may be disinclined to (a kind of self inhibition). This topic becomes unsolvable if the mind had an extra aspect in another dimension as we have no way of studying that, but if it were so there would need to be a link of sorts for it to affect our minds and hence the physical world, if so that is what needs to be explained if we make the assumption that physical laws are obeyed when we’re not looking.

Things like solving the rubiks cube depend on having a virtually photographic memory in addition to problem solving.

No photographic memory is necessary.  You “just” have to memorize algorithms for performing various actions.  There are slow, clunky ways of doing it (like the one I fumbled around with) and elegant, faster ways.

The trick is to develop a good set of algorithms that enable you to get it done quickly.  No one (as far as I know) has “God’s Algorithm” yet- the method which will always solve the Cube in the minimum number of moves, which is known to be seventeen for the most disordered state.

In any case, solving the Cube in 17.9 seconds with one hand is pretty amazing.

There is another way to solve the rubiks cube - melt the glue with a hairdryer and rearrange the stickers.

I never had to melt the glue. I was always able to just pry the stickers right off. Never thought of taking a hammer to it for that would require figuring how to put the pieces back together.

Another thing I’ve tried is re-colouring in the stickers with felt tips, but that didn’t go so well

Goth Rubic Cube- pry all the stickers off, leaving all sides black, then don’t ‘mix it up’- saying you cant be bothered with such fripperies.

How to annoy poseurs who boast of doing it in x seconds.

Take it to pieces- a half turn of the top layer (so it’s misaligned) followed by pressure with a vertical is less like to break it than the hammer method.
Reassemble ‘completed’ EXCEPT one corner- whic is ‘wrong’ -ie red where the blue should be, blue on white side, white on red side.
Mix it up- to hide your crime.

It is now impossible to do correctly.( the blocks dont rotate in place so there is no algorythm to do get to the solution, as every twist affects 8 blocks not one.

How to annoy poseurs who boast of doing it in x seconds.

Hussar, while this method might work with amateur poseurs, anyone capable of attaining competitive speeds would notice fairly quickly that the Cube is in a tampered state.  Of course, such people are not really poseurs anymore, even if they’re still annoying.

Another piece of conceptual art sometimes performed in the Cube’s heyday: buy six cubes, pry off the stickers, and reattach to make six solid-color Cubes.  These Cubes would be either impossible to solve, or always solved, depending on how you looked at it.