Wednesday, November 30, 2016

More Background Information on my Ignite Speech

My Ignite speech was centered around the very popular puzzle known as the Rubik's Cube, originating all the way back to 1974.  The entire speech was not necessarily meant to go into the details of how to solve the Rubik's Cube or the history of it, but rather a narrative of the lessons that I learned from solving a Rubik's Cube and the new mindset of tackling difficult challenges that I gained over the years.  However, during my first practice run of the speech,  a lot of my fellow classmates mentioned that they wanted to see more of how the cube was actually solved.


Taking the feedback for the official run of my Ignite Speech, I included two more slides on how the solving of the cube is actually done.  However, even then, 30-45 seconds is nowhere near long enough to explain how this complicated puzzle is solved.  To be honest, even using the entire 5 minutes would not have been enough time to do an entire speech on how to solve the Rubik's Cube.  When I first learned how to solve the cube, it took me at least five hours of trying to figure out the original instruction manual that I found online, and many many more hours to remember the steps.


The above is an excerpt from the original manual that I used to learn how to solve the Rubik's Cube, that you can find here in PDF form: http://lghttp.38568.nexcesscdn.net/8013252/pdf/uploads/general_content/Rubiks_cube_3x3_solution-en.pdf

Even then, this is not the exact method that I use to solve the cube today.  People often refer to the method described in the manual as "Beginner's Method," a form of CFOP, which I talked about in my speech, broken down into more steps for simplicity.  Even then, I use a slightly different variation to solve the cube known as "ZZ," created by Zbigniew Zborowski in 2006.  At this point, the exact methods that I use get extremely technical, so I won't go into them here.

I also talked about the Roux method in my presentation.  This method, although not used by many of the top speedcubers, still has the potential to be really fast - and also looks the coolest in my opinion!  In fact, if I could go back in time, I would have probably decided to learn Roux simply for its aesthetics in turning style.  An example of what I mean can be found in the video below.


As you can see, the Roux method uses a lot of "middle" layer turns, which looks very nice, to me at least.  For more information on all the methods I mentioned, see the links below.

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