The picture of the cube shown on the Atari Age cover is not impossible. In the game, you are not solving a Rubik's Cube. A move in the game is done by swapping the color of the "runner" with the color of the space he is on. The object is to get the nine spots on all six cube faces the be the same color in the fewest swaps possible. Since you are performing color swaps, not rotating pieces, any color combination is possible.
Your original unopened cube is actually a Schroedinger's Cube and it's in a superposition of all possible states until you open the box. Stay tuned for my thesis on cubic entanglement where changing the state of one cube affects its entangled pair buried at the bottom of your childhood toy box.
I feel like if someone asked me to design any of these products, I would immediately get a regular Rubik's cube, mess it up and use it as a reference for the design... I mean someone had to choose where to put the colors on these things and that seems like a much more tedious task than just copying. Maybe it's a copyright thing
Some of the "prettiness" of the Rubik's cube in design is the variety of colors. A simply scrambled cube might not feel "colorful" or pretty enough for the art designer. Has anyone worked out what the "prettiest" scramble is? Think of the factors: it can't be partially solved, or look too regular, but too random might also feel discordant and look ugly. (It's also likely that someone doing that research will try to copyright the results.)
To even think to do that, you'd first need to realize that there are restrictions on how the stickers can move, and that's simply not obvious on first encountering this puzzle.
Is it possible it's to try and prevent accusations of trademark infringement? Mr. Rubik could sue companies for using his trademark without permission. Then whoever makes the shirts can say it's not a rubik's cube because it's not a valid configuration of a rubik.
I'm guessing you posted this before watching to the end and seeing that the original company also made the same mistake. Turns out graphics design people aren't necessarily the same people as Rubik's solvers.
@@piethedye3948 is correct about the color scheme. White/Yellow, Red/Orange, Blue/Green is standard. You can get others, obviously, but the companies that make them also make standard ones.
I'm sure the manufacturer knew their product would inevitably be dropped a few times, not to mention hurled across rooms in frustration. Hopefully they built them appropriately sturdy.
The reason for these discrepancies is simple: The guys doing design, have little or no connection with the math wiz guys behind them. So the company making the design of the original packaging, probably were told: Make a cube on the box, and they just coloured as they saw fit never thinking of the math behind. Same with all the other designs. But it makes for fun videos though. :D
No one connected with these products cares about these products. What they saw was a bunch of kids and sometimes adults who use it as symbol of intelligence and they capitalized on it.
The sad thing is I bet some nerd brought it to the designer's attention, and instead of being thanked and fixing the design, they were probably reprimanded. Of course it won't hurt sales, and yes it still matters.
damn you matt! I thought you were gonna reveal how the belt wasn't solvable so I spent half an hour trying to figure out why, including solving my cube (with pink stickers to match!) to your belt buckle, and.. I was confused when I was successful. then I unpaused the video, and you said "but mine is solvable!" NOOO
Matt, there's a challenge I've been thinking about for sometime. It's so obvious that's impossible no one else has thought something like this already. I call it The Scramble Challenge. Considering that in a Rubik's Cube any scrambled state is a unique solved state, then I start with a "regular" solved state (all tiles with same color on every face) and try as fast as possible to reach a known scrambled state (made by other person on other cube, for example), exactly as you did to compare the card with your real cube. What you think about this challenge? Did you ever tried something like this? Maybe invite some speed cubers to try it? :) Best regards from Brazil
Diogo Custodio i havent tried this exact thing, but i have used the normal solving method to create cool looking patterns (which basically works in the same way) and that takes me like 1,5min (normal solve is 17sec for me). its a fun challenge to try some time, but its annoying cuz u keep having to look at the other cube while "solving"
Thijs Beentjes , exactly. I think the funny is to break the automatic way to solve and make us think about it. I'm not a speed cuber. I can solve in ~1min, but I like to understand how the cube works and try to find the best way to make a move. On the "reverse solving" or "scramble challenge", I always have to think a lot, because all the automatic moves I know are now broken. I wish some good speed cuber could try this and show how fast they can "solve" the cube for any random state given to them.
I think a lot of people already came on that idea, but I don't think anyone thought about doing that with world class speedcubers. Maybe it'll be a official WCA event anytime soon.
are you editing your videos with Premiere? if so, change in your rendersettings from interlaced to progressive, then you get rid of these lines when something moves fast
Why is it interlaced by default? We live in a digital age with LCD screens. Heck, why is 23.976/59.94 Hz still the standard in USA for digital video? Why does the colour space compress to 16-235? Why are these archaic standard still around and ruining digital video?
Matt, I'm surprised, that you didn't notice or just did't bother tellig you viewer, that there is also an dependency for rotation of two corners or two/three corner pieces. So if you disassamble and cube and rotate a corner piece on 120° it becomes unsolvable.
If you take a real rubik's cube apart and reassemble the pieces, is it always possible to solve it? What if you take a solved cube and only rotate a corner piece or only an edge piece? Can you rotate it back or will it always result in other pieces being rotated, too?
Paul Paulson a rubik's cube is not always solvable. Things that can make a standard cube unsolvable are: flipping an edge, rotating a corner once, and swapping a pair of edges/corners. Swapping an edge pair is equivalent to swapping a corner pair (can be changed from one to another using a T-permutation) and rotating a single corner once is the same as rotating two corners once in the same direction.
NO! If you rotate the edge piece for example, when you solve the cube, that edge that you rotated will still be rotated. If you did that with a corner piece, after you solve the cube, that corner will still be rotated aswell
Paul Paulson this is known as a parity, in a (normal) rubiks cube (6 different centers, nine colors per center) the total amount of combinations includes an edge piece flipped or a corner (etc.) But to be able to solve the rubiks cube more than 2 pieces have to be rotated(2 flipped edges) or more than 1 corner twisted. If not this will result in a valid scramble, but it will not be possible to flip only one edge or twist only one corner without affecting any of the others. To be able to solve the cube.
I was given a 7x7x7cube as a stocking stuffer for christmas. Solved it twice while I had time off. Already got used to 3x3x3 and the 4x4x4, but this...took me all day. Parity algorithms get me every time still. I prefer the worst method for solving it though, building up three sides perfectly from a corner. Fixing the other three sides on the 7x7x7 was a fun challenge!
Im so happy to see you telling these problem we cuber face, like only cuber understand cubers, it just trigger me sometime that non-cubers say stuff that they don't even understand about
I'm sure someone else has pointed this out to you, Mr. Parker, but the Atari game is not a rubik's cube simulator, but rather a video puzzle cube. In the game you don't rotate faces, but rather move the colors of the squares across the faces and cube itself. Imagine the game like moving the stickers of a rubik's cube. What makes the game fun is that your character, a diminutive elf traversing the cube, cannot step on any sticker of the color that it is carrying. In this game, the photo depicted on the cover of Atari Age is completely possible. Wonderful video, Mr. Parker.
Wait top 3? my friend got one for me and him for our birthdays. Anyways i have been cubing for 1-2 years and i only started getting sub- 40 using the valk 3
I assumed you would get around to mentioning that if you remove an edge piece and put it back flipped it can't be solved. Similarly, if you rotate a single corner piece. Douglas Hofstadter talks about this in an old Scientific American article (March 1981) in his column "Metamagical Themas" (a play on the "Mathematical Games" column by Martin Gardner).
I know what it feels like to get a impossible Rubik's cube. So, my dad went to Budapest Hungary and brought a really nice metal picture of a cube. When he got home he got it out and I asked if it was on sale. He's like why? I replied "look There is two white center pieces! To this day it hanging on my wall and a great memory of him.
fun fact, the original color scheme was not the yellow/white, blue/green, red/orange scheme. though its referred to as the Japanese color scheme nowadays, the original colors were white/blue, green/yellow, and red/orange (so blue and yellow were swapped compared to the current “normal” scheme). ive actually got my valk power m (new valk! gotta love it) set up with the japanese scheme because it looks a lot better when checkerboarded, and it gives this super modern cube a vintage feel. try it for yourself! it really helps with color neutrality during solves
Actually, both color schemes were used originally. I was in grade school when they came out-- my grandfather got my sister and I both a cube. Hers had the blue/green color scheme and mine was the blue/white color scheme.
I grew up with the blue/white colour scheme that my older brothers got.when they came out. I learned to solve it by solving the blue layer first and leaving the white on top for last. Many years later when I went and bought my own cube, I was totally confused because the colour scheme had blue and yellow swapped, which made it harder for me to solve. In future, I will only but the blue/white ones. The yellow/white scheme sucks.
We didn't need the Internet to get our hands on solution guides! Within a couple of months of me and a bunch of my friends getting our first cubes (Christmas of 1980), we were passing nth-generation photocopies of handwritten algorithms around the schools.
The best colouring of a cube is the three primary colours and the three secondary colours, with opposite colours on opposite faces. Though it not sold that way so you have to do it yourself. I'm just looking at mine with the blue-green-purple corner and thinking - isn't that nice
You mean light primary (red, green, blue) and secondary (cyan, magenta, yellow) colors or printing primary (cyan, magenta, yellow) and secondary (red, green, blue) colors?
I am someone who recently bought a Rubik's cube last month after realizing I never solved it as a kid, and I can't stress how accomplished it felt to finally solve. I also think anyone who really likes puzzles should do the same, but I would say hold off on looking up the solution. It will take several hours to solve and you will likely need to take notes but it is a really great puzzle when you get down to it. That being said, based only off of the difficulty of the puzzle, I still don't know how it became so popular and an icon of the 80's.
I too enjoy trying to solve possible rubiks cubes more than solving them. I often would use my speed cube and turn random corners either clockwise or counter clockwise and see if I could work them out again. I then also learned some algorithms in reverse to take a solved cube and then "transform" them into a solved cube with rotated corners.
There is also something else of note on the standard color scheme. Blue, orange, and yellow go in clockwise order (often called the BOY color scheme). Another requirement (or another way to recognize that it is in standard color scheme) is that red, white, and blue go in clockwise order. It is possible to have white opposite yellow, blue opposite green, and red opposite orange but one of the pairs flipped. If it is flipped then the other requirements will not be met.
For my 14th birthday cake my mom decided to make a Rubik's cube. Before she made it I demanded that she scramble an actual 3x3 and go off of that rather than just randomly smack colors on it. Also, who was screaming at 7:54? I know I was.
@@AttilaMatolcsy I read it was originally called a "magic cube", but your word and translation (being the correct one I'm sure!) is interesting news! I like "Magical Cube" better than "Magic Cube" by far.
@@doodoostickstain Bűvös means magical But it was sold as magic cube instead of magical... I don't really know why they left magical and simplified it with magic, but in Hungary it was called magical for sure(but in Hungarian)
www.kungfoomanchu.com/home.html#333 (and web.archive.org/web/20120501184706/badmephisto.com/beg.php ) and lar5.com/cube/index.html have good guides. There are many many more, such as ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/advanced-cfop-fridrich/ and solvethecube.com/speedcubing
Also search youtube as there are many helpful guides with each step having a separate video. Super helpful when you're practicing but struggling with a particular algorithm
A few years ago I came across another kind of 'impossible' rubik's cube ... it was best describes as a franken-cube. even in it's solved state it looked unsolved as one of the pieces had a hay-green tile that was easily mistaken for yellow when it was next to the regular green tiles.
Love the video Matt, I was watching this one last night and when I turned on Big Bang Theory there was a Rubik's cube tissue holder on the end table in that show- odd... anyway, love your videos - you're awesome (and on OAS), Steve
I used to practice on my mum’s Rubik’s cube key ring. So not only did it have the original style bearings but it was also about half the size of a classic cube and had less leverage to turn the faces. Probably also a lot of dust and grit inside. I never understood how people could speed solve them. I was lucky if I could turn the faces without it getting jammed out of alignment so that no other edges would turn cleanly.
The original packaging also has orange and red together on the bottom corner, white and yellow together on the middle corner, and the white, blue and red corners in the wrong order. You could argue that it’s just the official coloring but it’d make sense for the original cube to follow that :p (Also, another thing that makes the cube impossible regardless of coloring: based on the middle corner, yellow would be opposite to blue and green would be opposite to red, making the two yellow-blue edges and the red-green-? corner in the top left impossible)
So glad they mentioned that cubes can be disassembled. My number one pet peeve when it comes to cubing is people being too short-sighted to think of that.
Good video, I enjoyed it and all your observations. I'm surprised you point out the repeating edges several times but not the repeating center pieces which occurred nearly just as many times in all the products you showed.
Yes, it is called interlacing distortion. Probably an error in exporting the video. It is usually found when digitizing old video from TV since TV uses/used interlaced video (i.e. 480i, 720i, 1080i etc).
A question arise in my mind: whats the furthest possible "scramble" a rubik's cube can be from the solved state? Example: if i take a solved cube and do a quarter twist, it will be 1 move of distance from the solved state; if i do a half twist, 2 moves from the solved state, and so on. Basically, whats the highest number possible of elementary moves (a minimum move is a quarter twist if im correct) a cube can be from the solved state? Of course excluding redundant moves like 1 quarter twist in a direction and 1 quarter twist in the contrary of that direction that basically nullify it.
Hey Matt, I have a challenge for you: Solve a Rubik's cube to a state, in which each of the 9 rings around the cube has 2 stickers of each color. A ring is a set of stickers in one, parallel to a face, line, walking along it around the cube. A ring thus consists of 12 stickers. Good luck!
@1:30 you say it gives you "26, now 25, individual cubes". Since the centers don't come off there are twenty cubies that are separate (12 edges + 8 corners) plus the core that has the six centers
I think there's a second problem with the picture on the original cube box. Look at the white/green/yellow corner between the two blue/yellow edges. It's obviously in the wrong spot, but there are only 3 other positions it can be in. If you rotate white center clockwise, then the green is on the blue face, so that's out. If you rotate the white center counterclockwise, then yellow is on the red face, and that's out. So the only place it can be by process of elimination is on the opposite corner (180 degree rotation of the white center). But that puts the yellow opposite to the blue, so you CAN'T have a blue/yellow edge.
just because you can put the pieces back together in a certain arrangement doesn't mean it's possible because of edge flips or corner twists but in that example you couldn't see the back so that one has to be possible
at least on my smartphone interlacing wasn't visible. the good thing is: deinterlacing works pretty well on full hd, even with simpler algorithms. thx for the vid wrong configurations happen, wouldn't even have noticed it without you mentioning it :)
When I teach beginners how to solve a rubik's cube, this is my first lesson. It is helpful to be able to cheat so you can practice your algorithms and develop new ones, cleanly seeing what they do. I did that by solving what I could and keeping careful track of what changed when I tried something with pen and paper, but there's no disrespect to doing it by cheating to solve the cube first. So my first lesson is often how to cheat correctly.
Some of the older Rubik's Cubes had blue opposite white instead of yellow and I have two of those so I am never bothered by current nonstandard coloring.
My dad as a kid had a Rubik’s Cube that his brother had peeled off the stickers at one point, making it an impossible cube, so I tried to fix that, yet somehow they screwed it up to an extent that it didn’t even have 9 of each color! It was impossible to fix even by moving the stickers. That just pissed me off for some reason. It wasn’t even a good cube.
i learned how to take apart and put together the cube from my friend when I was like 8 before I even knew you could take the stickers off It took me another 8 years to finally decide to learn how to properly solve one
Here's a challenge. Disassemble a cube and put it back together randomly then see if you can solve it. I'm pretty sure there's a 1/12 chance of getting a cube that can be solved. You could also devise a fair bet for those odds and use it as a game against others.
On the tissue cube, there's also a white, green, and blue corner. Impossible since green and blue (on just about every cube, by convention) are opposite sides.
I found a nice way of checking if any corners where flipped, but is there a fast way to see if the edges are flipped? My method for the corners was to look at a face and pick 2 colours that where on opposite sides of the cube (white and yellow in this example). Then looking at each corner around that face count how many rotations each corner had done. So if the white/yellow sticker was facing up it would be 0, rotated clockwise 1 it would be 1, and rotated anti-clockwise once it would be 2 or -1. Then look at the opposite face and continue. If the answer is a multiple of 3 then it is valid. Not that hard to see why this would work, but I couldn’t think of one for the edges
2:35 "If you look at the orange ones..." Funny thing: when he first held up the tissue box cover, I thought to myself, "There seem to be a lot of orange ones on that." I didn't count them or anything, if just seemed like there might be too many... good to know that my intuition for amounts works well.
I've got a lovely impossible cube that can be rendered possible or can allow you to straight up cheat. The "Rubiks Noob" (a mod of mine) You rip off all the stickers, glue on black 2x2 lego tiles, and now you can free range add on lego ""stickers"" making it impossible, if you want. Or you can ""solve"" (for those who cant solve. The possibilities are quite nice. :D
On your T-shirt the color scheme is the original design where the white is opposite blue instead of yellow. So the color scheme on the shirt is actually correct.
We had the Original Rubik's Cube in the box as stocking stuffers when we were kids. As you said it is a nasty beast. As for fun can you tell a person's age from the time the got their 1st Rubik's cube?
I have seen similar errors with logos depicting 6 sided dice. Standard dice have the opposite sides add up to 7. I cannot locate it at the moment, but I have seen advertisements showing dice in the logo with adjacent sides adding to 7.
The centres on the original Rubik's Cube package is also incorrect. If you put white on the left then it is blue, orange, green, red. When in the picture on the package if you looked at the full it would be blue, red, green, orange
Now Matt that you have tried out the action on the original design/materials I'm sure you will realize how maddening it was to try to solve it quickly. We were quite thrilled if we got a time under 60 seconds. 😩
The cube on your shirt isn't melting; it's being (dis)solved.
Datenegassie hahaha I got the pun😂
Dissolving due to its unsolvable state.
Get out
Oh haha
CH.A.O.S TV I'm so proud of you.
3:16 also right there you can see two white centers smh
I noticed that before he pointed out the other error. I scrolled down to see how many other people noticed that lol.
There are also two identical center pieces on the cufflinks.
Yeah, I can't believe he missed that!
...and on the Atari Age cover as well.
Damnit you beat me to it :)
i was going to say the same thing. can't have 2 white centers
right?
The picture of the cube shown on the Atari Age cover is not impossible. In the game, you are not solving a Rubik's Cube. A move in the game is done by swapping the color of the "runner" with the color of the space he is on. The object is to get the nine spots on all six cube faces the be the same color in the fewest swaps possible. Since you are performing color swaps, not rotating pieces, any color combination is possible.
Your original unopened cube is actually a Schroedinger's Cube and it's in a superposition of all possible states until you open the box. Stay tuned for my thesis on cubic entanglement where changing the state of one cube affects its entangled pair buried at the bottom of your childhood toy box.
tool462 wow...
Well done!
Sounds like a good read!
tool462 This is basically how to take something simple and make it look complicated
You fun knee
I feel like if someone asked me to design any of these products, I would immediately get a regular Rubik's cube, mess it up and use it as a reference for the design... I mean someone had to choose where to put the colors on these things and that seems like a much more tedious task than just copying. Maybe it's a copyright thing
Boredness Copywite would make sense.
Some of the "prettiness" of the Rubik's cube in design is the variety of colors. A simply scrambled cube might not feel "colorful" or pretty enough for the art designer.
Has anyone worked out what the "prettiest" scramble is? Think of the factors: it can't be partially solved, or look too regular, but too random might also feel discordant and look ugly.
(It's also likely that someone doing that research will try to copyright the results.)
To even think to do that, you'd first need to realize that there are restrictions on how the stickers can move, and that's simply not obvious on first encountering this puzzle.
Melinda Green well once you understand the cube you can do anything, with just basic begginer algorithms I can make any pattern I want
Even knowing what cube algorithms are is a lot of information. You probably don't remember what it was like to not know anything about it.
@2:58 2 white centers....
^ this
^ that
^ the other
Finally. I've been waiting for that response for a solid 48 minutes.
Parker sq
Nearly gave me a heart attack when you almost opened that box
Then he dropped it
A lot of them had two of the same centers too
Speedcubing Nerd 2 of them. Not really "a lot"
Broken Wave 2/5 40%. That's a lot.
TheJollyLoli nah. So if I got 40% on a test that’s a lot? Nah that’s a trash score
@@thunderninja9819 But if 2/5 of a population does that's a lot
Is it possible it's to try and prevent accusations of trademark infringement?
Mr. Rubik could sue companies for using his trademark without permission. Then whoever makes the shirts can say it's not a rubik's cube because it's not a valid configuration of a rubik.
non Rubik's brand cubes have a slightly different color scheme that allows them to avoid copyright, these examples could do the same
I'm guessing you posted this before watching to the end and seeing that the original company also made the same mistake. Turns out graphics design people aren't necessarily the same people as Rubik's solvers.
Unless you're saying that the colors are tinted differently, you're wrong, its almost always the same order of colors
@kapik k
@@piethedye3948 is correct about the color scheme. White/Yellow, Red/Orange, Blue/Green is standard. You can get others, obviously, but the companies that make them also make standard ones.
Impossible Rubik’s cubes should be called Parker cubes.
Things cubers hate:
4. People spelling Rubik's as rubix
Sam M omfg 😩😩😩😩 I usually explain the whole Ernö Rubik thing to try and help correct their misuse
Do you mean Rubix cubers
@@obiz0561 thats a joke, right?
Rubicks Kube
Nah, it's rubi'x cube
"Too many oranges!!" -- Matt Parker 2017
And not enough grapefruit.
Pierre Abbat
Oh wow, I found an apple.
Im a farmer, want some more grapefruits for oranges?
Guhan s a
Guhan s 7.8/10 too many oranges
I had an original Rubik's Cube back in the 80's. It became gummed up with my tears because I couldn't solve it.
Threedog1963 that’s sad
I still can't solve mine it's been solved like five times but I had a guide and I lost that so it's just sitting on my shelf
"no way I would damage my original packaging rubik's cube!" *drops it on the table*
Yeah, that hurt.
I'm sure the manufacturer knew their product would inevitably be dropped a few times, not to mention hurled across rooms in frustration. Hopefully they built them appropriately sturdy.
@@Duncan_Idaho_Potato The cube? Yes.
The box? Not quite so much.
7:53 You almost gave me a heart attack.
Wanted to write exactly the same!
^ This
^ that
I was about to comment "Does this guy have too much money to waste or something?"
^^ those
The cufflinks at 3:00 has 2 middle white pieces
Also impossible
Though I was the only one how noticed
5:36 there are also two red (orange) center pieces
the thing that annoys cubers more than impossible rubik's cubes is...
*rubix*
*NICE RUBRICKX*
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
My frind kän solf a rubberiks kup inn laik feif säkendz.
kappa
I agree 100%
What about Rubic's?
The reason for these discrepancies is simple: The guys doing design, have little or no connection with the math wiz guys behind them. So the company making the design of the original packaging, probably were told: Make a cube on the box, and they just coloured as they saw fit never thinking of the math behind. Same with all the other designs.
But it makes for fun videos though. :D
But you don't even have to think about the math at all! Just get a Rubiks Cube, scramble it however you like and then base your design on that.
No one connected with these products cares about these products. What they saw was a bunch of kids and sometimes adults who use it as symbol of intelligence and they capitalized on it.
Haha, you say that But I've done a rubiks cube graphic and made it wrong intentionally, basically because I know people enjoy seeing it wrong.
The sad thing is I bet some nerd brought it to the designer's attention, and instead of being thanked and fixing the design, they were probably reprimanded. Of course it won't hurt sales, and yes it still matters.
Um.... duh? Lol
damn you matt! I thought you were gonna reveal how the belt wasn't solvable so I spent half an hour trying to figure out why, including solving my cube (with pink stickers to match!) to your belt buckle, and.. I was confused when I was successful. then I unpaused the video, and you said "but mine is solvable!" NOOO
Interlacing problem?
That was the first thing I thought.
Parker deinterlacing
it's a rubik's cube video
It only happens for me if I'm not viewing the video fullscreen, so no idea what's going on there.
d2factotum same for me.
1:07 obviously, it lack one side completely, and lacks one additional centerpiece... AND it's hollow!
Svante Bengtson lol
Svante Bengtson
Hollow... Reminds me of void cubes.
Not just that, if you look closely you can see that the pieces are fixed together. You can't even turn it!
Why is it apparently so hard to GET a rubik code, rearrange it, then use that as the basis for the image/model/t-shirt whatever.? Lazy people! tut tut
You don't even have to buy one, you can just use an online rubik's cube.
Alex Watson I think the problem is that people don't even realize that there's positions that aren't solve able.
Maybe people don't understand some of the more specific unsolvable variations, but if there's 11 orange stickers? C'mon.
Because the people that design t-shirts/logos don't know how Rubik's cubes work. Or maybe it's to avoid copyright infringement.
Alex Watson Easier still, a designer could get a real life Rubik's cube, jumble it into a nice, random-looking configuration, and use it as a model.
Matt, there's a challenge I've been thinking about for sometime.
It's so obvious that's impossible no one else has thought something like this already.
I call it The Scramble Challenge.
Considering that in a Rubik's Cube any scrambled state is a unique solved state, then I start with a "regular" solved state (all tiles with same color on every face) and try as fast as possible to reach a known scrambled state (made by other person on other cube, for example), exactly as you did to compare the card with your real cube.
What you think about this challenge?
Did you ever tried something like this?
Maybe invite some speed cubers to try it? :)
Best regards from Brazil
Diogo Custodio i havent tried this exact thing, but i have used the normal solving method to create cool looking patterns (which basically works in the same way) and that takes me like 1,5min (normal solve is 17sec for me). its a fun challenge to try some time, but its annoying cuz u keep having to look at the other cube while "solving"
Thijs Beentjes , exactly. I think the funny is to break the automatic way to solve and make us think about it.
I'm not a speed cuber. I can solve in ~1min, but I like to understand how the cube works and try to find the best way to make a move.
On the "reverse solving" or "scramble challenge", I always have to think a lot, because all the automatic moves I know are now broken.
I wish some good speed cuber could try this and show how fast they can "solve" the cube for any random state given to them.
I think a lot of people already came on that idea, but I don't think anyone thought about doing that with world class speedcubers.
Maybe it'll be a official WCA event anytime soon.
Diogo Custodio the best rescramble is 17 seconds or less. Search ‘uwr rubiks cube rescramble record’
*urge to comment about parker cubes intensifies*
Streak? DanG? NLSS Crew? You guys infest everything. :P
Let's
I think you'd enjoy fewest move challenge since you like the big brain puzzle solving aspect more than the Speedy aspect
are you editing your videos with Premiere? if so, change in your rendersettings from interlaced to progressive, then you get rid of these lines when something moves fast
oh my god thank you man, this happens to me a lot
OTTWDTEWMITFGLTAM, I guess you find TWOWers in the strangest places.
Yes, interlaced pains me when it isn't absolutely necessary, lol. Progressive scan is so much nicer.
Why is it interlaced by default? We live in a digital age with LCD screens. Heck, why is 23.976/59.94 Hz still the standard in USA for digital video? Why does the colour space compress to 16-235? Why are these archaic standard still around and ruining digital video?
Matt, I'm surprised, that you didn't notice or just did't bother tellig you viewer, that there is also an dependency for rotation of two corners or two/three corner pieces. So if you disassamble and cube and rotate a corner piece on 120° it becomes unsolvable.
but then you could technically also rotate a corner on the other side
I thought point #3 would be misspellings of the word Rubik's
Don't you mean *rubix* ?
Ali161102 Actually it’s rubrik’s
Erick Lescano Nice rubric
Woah. Is that a 10x10?
Rubirxr's™
When you went to open the original Rubiks cube I litteraly yelled "NOnonono!" at my screen. I'm SO glad you reacted the way you did. :')
If you take a real rubik's cube apart and reassemble the pieces, is it always possible to solve it? What if you take a solved cube and only rotate a corner piece or only an edge piece? Can you rotate it back or will it always result in other pieces being rotated, too?
Paul Paulson no, you can rotate a single edge piece and it would be unsolvable.
Paul Paulson a rubik's cube is not always solvable. Things that can make a standard cube unsolvable are: flipping an edge, rotating a corner once, and swapping a pair of edges/corners. Swapping an edge pair is equivalent to swapping a corner pair (can be changed from one to another using a T-permutation) and rotating a single corner once is the same as rotating two corners once in the same direction.
NO! If you rotate the edge piece for example, when you solve the cube, that edge that you rotated will still be rotated. If you did that with a corner piece, after you solve the cube, that corner will still be rotated aswell
Paul Paulson this is known as a parity, in a (normal) rubiks cube (6 different centers, nine colors per center) the total amount of combinations includes an edge piece flipped or a corner (etc.) But to be able to solve the rubiks cube more than 2 pieces have to be rotated(2 flipped edges) or more than 1 corner twisted. If not this will result in a valid scramble, but it will not be possible to flip only one edge or twist only one corner without affecting any of the others. To be able to solve the cube.
Paul Paulson no
I love seeing Matt getting so excited over these things, makes me feel less weird when I do it myself
2:48 "theres simply too many oranges" - standupmaths the fruit hater LOL
I was given a 7x7x7cube as a stocking stuffer for christmas. Solved it twice while I had time off. Already got used to 3x3x3 and the 4x4x4, but this...took me all day. Parity algorithms get me every time still. I prefer the worst method for solving it though, building up three sides perfectly from a corner. Fixing the other three sides on the 7x7x7 was a fun challenge!
Is there any merch of SOLVED cubes...?
Im so happy to see you telling these problem we cuber face, like only cuber understand cubers, it just trigger me sometime that non-cubers say stuff that they don't even understand about
I am currently wearing a Rubik's cube t-shirt and I've spotted 5 mistakes lol. Good video btw 👌 👍
I'm sure someone else has pointed this out to you, Mr. Parker, but the Atari game is not a rubik's cube simulator, but rather a video puzzle cube. In the game you don't rotate faces, but rather move the colors of the squares across the faces and cube itself. Imagine the game like moving the stickers of a rubik's cube. What makes the game fun is that your character, a diminutive elf traversing the cube, cannot step on any sticker of the color that it is carrying. In this game, the photo depicted on the cover of Atari Age is completely possible. Wonderful video, Mr. Parker.
I'm so happy to hear you rock a Valk3 like me. They really are amongst the top three cubes on the market.
Nice Thunderclap, too.
Valk3 is amazing
Wait top 3? my friend got one for me and him for our birthdays. Anyways i have been cubing for 1-2 years and i only started getting sub- 40 using the valk 3
I use yuxin little magic M and Gan X
I assumed you would get around to mentioning that if you remove an edge piece and put it back flipped it can't be solved. Similarly, if you rotate a single corner piece. Douglas Hofstadter talks about this in an old Scientific American article (March 1981) in his column "Metamagical Themas" (a play on the "Mathematical Games" column by Martin Gardner).
I know what it feels like to get a impossible Rubik's cube. So, my dad went to Budapest Hungary and brought a really nice metal picture of a cube. When he got home he got it out and I asked if it was on sale. He's like why? I replied "look There is two white center pieces! To this day it hanging on my wall and a great memory of him.
When you brought those scissors close to that gold tape gave me some serious anxiety! Lol you got me with that one, well done!
fun fact, the original color scheme was not the yellow/white, blue/green, red/orange scheme. though its referred to as the Japanese color scheme nowadays, the original colors were white/blue, green/yellow, and red/orange (so blue and yellow were swapped compared to the current “normal” scheme). ive actually got my valk power m (new valk! gotta love it) set up with the japanese scheme because it looks a lot better when checkerboarded, and it gives this super modern cube a vintage feel. try it for yourself! it really helps with color neutrality during solves
Actually, both color schemes were used originally. I was in grade school when they came out-- my grandfather got my sister and I both a cube. Hers had the blue/green color scheme and mine was the blue/white color scheme.
Mine from 1980 (in UK, made in Hungary; Ideal Toy Corp.) is blue/green, red/white, orange/yellow.
I grew up with the blue/white colour scheme that my older brothers got.when they came out. I learned to solve it by solving the blue layer first and leaving the white on top for last.
Many years later when I went and bought my own cube, I was totally confused because the colour scheme had blue and yellow swapped, which made it harder for me to solve.
In future, I will only but the blue/white ones. The yellow/white scheme sucks.
We didn't need the Internet to get our hands on solution guides! Within a couple of months of me and a bunch of my friends getting our first cubes (Christmas of 1980), we were passing nth-generation photocopies of handwritten algorithms around the schools.
The best colouring of a cube is the three primary colours and the three secondary colours, with opposite colours on opposite faces. Though it not sold that way so you have to do it yourself. I'm just looking at mine with the blue-green-purple corner and thinking - isn't that nice
*@Neville Tomatos,* nah. Best is 6 different colours between pink and purple.
So are you actually diagnosed with OCD or are you just weird?
You mean light primary (red, green, blue) and secondary (cyan, magenta, yellow) colors or printing primary (cyan, magenta, yellow) and secondary (red, green, blue) colors?
primary: red, yellow, blue
secondary: green, orange, purple
obviously
How about: Red opposite Green, Blue opposite Yellow, and White opposite Black.
Yay opponent process. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process
I am someone who recently bought a Rubik's cube last month after realizing I never solved it as a kid, and I can't stress how accomplished it felt to finally solve. I also think anyone who really likes puzzles should do the same, but I would say hold off on looking up the solution. It will take several hours to solve and you will likely need to take notes but it is a really great puzzle when you get down to it. That being said, based only off of the difficulty of the puzzle, I still don't know how it became so popular and an icon of the 80's.
At 3:20 who else realized there are two middle whites
Payton Jacobellis i did
I too enjoy trying to solve possible rubiks cubes more than solving them. I often would use my speed cube and turn random corners either clockwise or counter clockwise and see if I could work them out again. I then also learned some algorithms in reverse to take a solved cube and then "transform" them into a solved cube with rotated corners.
Almost gave me a heart attack with those scissors and that unopened original rubik's cube...
There is also something else of note on the standard color scheme. Blue, orange, and yellow go in clockwise order (often called the BOY color scheme). Another requirement (or another way to recognize that it is in standard color scheme) is that red, white, and blue go in clockwise order. It is possible to have white opposite yellow, blue opposite green, and red opposite orange but one of the pairs flipped. If it is flipped then the other requirements will not be met.
Is this the 1980s
Chef Shields no this is patrick
+Chef Shields - I wish
Swag Llama Hello , is this Patrick?
No it’s 2018
THE BOI THAT GAMES I wrote this in 2017
I love how you say at the start peel the stickers off, an d hold up a stickerless cube
For my 14th birthday cake my mom decided to make a Rubik's cube. Before she made it I demanded that she scramble an actual 3x3 and go off of that rather than just randomly smack colors on it.
Also, who was screaming at 7:54? I know I was.
48fanfromky 7:59 was a sigh of relief
0:39 that hand gesture and the tissues...
The tissue cover thing also has two orange-yellow edges.
I'm from Hungary, so 8:00 is really heartmelting for me.
bro, now i want one of those. that's a legit first edition.
...and now i'm bidding on one on ebay >_
@@doodoostickstain
Did you know, that" Rubik's cube"'s original name was "Bűvös kocka"? Translated: _Magical cube_
@@AttilaMatolcsy I read it was originally called a "magic cube", but your word and translation (being the correct one I'm sure!) is interesting news! I like "Magical Cube" better than "Magic Cube" by far.
@@doodoostickstain Bűvös means magical
But it was sold as magic cube instead of magical... I don't really know why they left magical and simplified it with magic, but in Hungary it was called magical for sure(but in Hungarian)
#ParkerCube
0:15 already liked, for the stickers thing 😂😂👏
Where is the link to the beginners guide? You've not put it in the description! 🤔
Sorry! Forgot to put it in. I’ve fixed it now. Thanks. think-maths.co.uk/downloads/rubiks-cube-solving-instructions
www.kungfoomanchu.com/home.html#333 (and web.archive.org/web/20120501184706/badmephisto.com/beg.php ) and lar5.com/cube/index.html have good guides. There are many many more, such as ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/advanced-cfop-fridrich/ and solvethecube.com/speedcubing
Also search youtube as there are many helpful guides with each step having a separate video. Super helpful when you're practicing but struggling with a particular algorithm
For the begginers method, I used redkbs tutorial.
A few years ago I came across another kind of 'impossible' rubik's cube ... it was best describes as a franken-cube.
even in it's solved state it looked unsolved as one of the pieces had a hay-green tile that was easily mistaken for yellow when it was next to the regular green tiles.
I'm going to be that one guy....
Ain't that the guy on Outrageous Acts of Science?
Love the video Matt, I was watching this one last night and when I turned on Big Bang Theory there was a Rubik's cube tissue holder on the end table in that show- odd... anyway, love your videos - you're awesome (and on OAS), Steve
It's unsolvable, other than it being melted... hahaha
Science joke lol i get it
As a kid I had one of these Rubik's cubes. With time they get loosen up and can be really speedy. Lovely toy for any 7-8-9 year old.
The "coloring" is called the color scheme of the cube
Manan daboss Whatever man.
Matheus Moura you're a non cuber
+Manan daboss You mean they're a parker-cuber?
Manan daboss that and the persistent calling of cubies other names...
You mean the colour scheme?
I used to practice on my mum’s Rubik’s cube key ring. So not only did it have the original style bearings but it was also about half the size of a classic cube and had less leverage to turn the faces. Probably also a lot of dust and grit inside. I never understood how people could speed solve them. I was lucky if I could turn the faces without it getting jammed out of alignment so that no other edges would turn cleanly.
0:04 XD! HAHA
The original packaging also has orange and red together on the bottom corner, white and yellow together on the middle corner, and the white, blue and red corners in the wrong order. You could argue that it’s just the official coloring but it’d make sense for the original cube to follow that :p
(Also, another thing that makes the cube impossible regardless of coloring: based on the middle corner, yellow would be opposite to blue and green would be opposite to red, making the two yellow-blue edges and the red-green-? corner in the top left impossible)
How to trigger a nerd 101
So glad they mentioned that cubes can be disassembled. My number one pet peeve when it comes to cubing is people being too short-sighted to think of that.
*Enjoys video* *He says "This is a Valk 3, ir doesn't get better than this"* *Dislikes the video*
Good video, I enjoyed it and all your observations.
I'm surprised you point out the repeating edges several times but not the repeating center pieces which occurred nearly just as many times in all the products you showed.
Is it just me or there's a weird distortion in the video
Yes, it is called interlacing distortion. Probably an error in exporting the video. It is usually found when digitizing old video from TV since TV uses/used interlaced video (i.e. 480i, 720i, 1080i etc).
It is just you, go see a doctor
Are you using Firefox by any chance? I get the same distortion on Firefox, but it's fine when I use Chrome
720pony I use Chrome.
Right now one the TH-cam app it works fine
+Haxxx5 that's because scaling down an interlaced video makes it no longer interlaced
A question arise in my mind: whats the furthest possible "scramble" a rubik's cube can be from the solved state? Example: if i take a solved cube and do a quarter twist, it will be 1 move of distance from the solved state; if i do a half twist, 2 moves from the solved state, and so on. Basically, whats the highest number possible of elementary moves (a minimum move is a quarter twist if im correct) a cube can be from the solved state? Of course excluding redundant moves like 1 quarter twist in a direction and 1 quarter twist in the contrary of that direction that basically nullify it.
Hey Matt, I have a challenge for you:
Solve a Rubik's cube to a state, in which each of the 9 rings around the cube has 2 stickers of each color. A ring is a set of stickers in one, parallel to a face, line, walking along it around the cube. A ring thus consists of 12 stickers. Good luck!
@1:30 you say it gives you "26, now 25, individual cubes". Since the centers don't come off there are twenty cubies that are separate (12 edges + 8 corners) plus the core that has the six centers
I think there's a second problem with the picture on the original cube box. Look at the white/green/yellow corner between the two blue/yellow edges. It's obviously in the wrong spot, but there are only 3 other positions it can be in. If you rotate white center clockwise, then the green is on the blue face, so that's out. If you rotate the white center counterclockwise, then yellow is on the red face, and that's out. So the only place it can be by process of elimination is on the opposite corner (180 degree rotation of the white center). But that puts the yellow opposite to the blue, so you CAN'T have a blue/yellow edge.
just because you can put the pieces back together in a certain arrangement doesn't mean it's possible because of edge flips or corner twists but in that example you couldn't see the back so that one has to be possible
at least on my smartphone interlacing wasn't visible. the good thing is: deinterlacing works pretty well on full hd, even with simpler algorithms.
thx for the vid
wrong configurations happen, wouldn't even have noticed it without you mentioning it :)
3:00 I like how he addresses the 2 BO edges and not the 2 WHITE CENTRES!
When I teach beginners how to solve a rubik's cube, this is my first lesson. It is helpful to be able to cheat so you can practice your algorithms and develop new ones, cleanly seeing what they do. I did that by solving what I could and keeping careful track of what changed when I tried something with pen and paper, but there's no disrespect to doing it by cheating to solve the cube first. So my first lesson is often how to cheat correctly.
This has got to be one of my favourite SUM videos for some reason.
On the original packaging, I think the two corner pieces with green and white also make it impossible.
Some of the older Rubik's Cubes had blue opposite white instead of yellow and I have two of those so I am never bothered by current nonstandard coloring.
My dad as a kid had a Rubik’s Cube that his brother had peeled off the stickers at one point, making it an impossible cube, so I tried to fix that, yet somehow they screwed it up to an extent that it didn’t even have 9 of each color! It was impossible to fix even by moving the stickers. That just pissed me off for some reason. It wasn’t even a good cube.
i learned how to take apart and put together the cube from my friend when I was like 8 before I even knew you could take the stickers off
It took me another 8 years to finally decide to learn how to properly solve one
Here's a challenge. Disassemble a cube and put it back together randomly then see if you can solve it. I'm pretty sure there's a 1/12 chance of getting a cube that can be solved. You could also devise a fair bet for those odds and use it as a game against others.
Fantastic video, but why are you shooting interlaced video? It's 2017, please shoot progressive, interlaced looks terrible.
On the tissue cube, there's also a white, green, and blue corner. Impossible since green and blue (on just about every cube, by convention) are opposite sides.
I found a nice way of checking if any corners where flipped, but is there a fast way to see if the edges are flipped?
My method for the corners was to look at a face and pick 2 colours that where on opposite sides of the cube (white and yellow in this example). Then looking at each corner around that face count how many rotations each corner had done. So if the white/yellow sticker was facing up it would be 0, rotated clockwise 1 it would be 1, and rotated anti-clockwise once it would be 2 or -1. Then look at the opposite face and continue. If the answer is a multiple of 3 then it is valid. Not that hard to see why this would work, but I couldn’t think of one for the edges
2:35 "If you look at the orange ones..." Funny thing: when he first held up the tissue box cover, I thought to myself, "There seem to be a lot of orange ones on that." I didn't count them or anything, if just seemed like there might be too many... good to know that my intuition for amounts works well.
To think all these Rubik's memorabilia could have been done correctly by just looking for an image of a real scrambled rubix cube.
I've got a lovely impossible cube that can be rendered possible or can allow you to straight up cheat. The "Rubiks Noob" (a mod of mine) You rip off all the stickers, glue on black 2x2 lego tiles, and now you can free range add on lego ""stickers"" making it impossible, if you want. Or you can ""solve"" (for those who cant solve. The possibilities are quite nice. :D
On your T-shirt the color scheme is the original design where the white is opposite blue instead of yellow. So the color scheme on the shirt is actually correct.
Great video!
But you should disable interlacing because it doesn’t really work unprocessed on LCDs
Also don't forget that rotating exactly one side or flipping one edge leaves an unsolvable cube
We had the Original Rubik's Cube in the box as stocking stuffers when we were kids. As you said it is a nasty beast. As for fun can you tell a person's age from the time the got their 1st Rubik's cube?
I have seen similar errors with logos depicting 6 sided dice. Standard dice have the opposite sides add up to 7. I cannot locate it at the moment, but I have seen advertisements showing dice in the logo with adjacent sides adding to 7.
The centres on the original Rubik's Cube package is also incorrect. If you put white on the left then it is blue, orange, green, red. When in the picture on the package if you looked at the full it would be blue, red, green, orange
Now Matt that you have tried out the action on the original design/materials I'm sure you will realize how maddening it was to try to solve it quickly. We were quite thrilled if we got a time under 60 seconds. 😩
I am amazed how developers of these product could do this!