I’ve been trying to master this piece of coloured toy, which seems to be nerve-racking to solve for most people.

But, there are a number of people around the world competing in “Speed Cubing”; to arrange the cubes in the shortest amount of time. And here comes the interesting part…

A normal (3×3×3) Rubik’s Cube can have (8! × 3⁸⁻¹) × (12! × 2¹²⁻¹)/2 = 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different positions

So, however… I’ve been doing some pretty neat algorithms for the cube, and I finally mastered some of them. My first “total” time from a totally scrambled cube to a solved cube is somewhere around 2 hours. Well, after all…it’s my second day practicing this sport (you should see my sweaty face). Now I need to reduce my time to…say…1 minute… :)

Edit: (September 6, 2007)
I am now solving the first two layers (F2L) in about 10 minutes. That’s progress :D I am trying to learn the corners cases and permutation cases of the last layer. These algorithms are used for efficiency in the time frame.
There are 21 different combinations for the PLL (permuting last layer) and 40 combinations for the COLL (corner orientation of last layer).