Cubing - 3x3x3 AKA The "Gateway" Cube

I'm not quite sure how it started. It probably started with one of the various videos that Numberphile did on combinations possible on a Rubik's Cube. Somehow I got diverted to a random review or unboxing (a genre of video I never thought I'd come to appreciate). And then I finally got my election check.

All events conspiring to start me down the road to twisty puzzle inundation. (See, I say twisty puzzle because Rubik's is only one of many brands now.) I tried searching out the Rubik's Cube lost somewhere around the house, but it's probably for the best that I hadn't found it, and not just because the original design is super hard to use. After having seen several cool-looking, fast-moving cubes, I just had to have one.

The pink is milder in person

From what I can tell, cubing is much bigger in China. As such, all of my cubes are from prominent speed-cube brands. My first cube is the MoYu WeiLong - specifically, the stickerless pink variant. Since I don't have to worry about it being competition legal and whatnot, I wanted a non-standard color scheme.

Learning how to solve it was pretty rough. Despite being (what I now know to be) the second easiest NxNxN cube to solve, it took me a week or two to learn and memorize the sets of moves known as "Beginner's Method." The 3x3 became super easy to solve.

These colors, however, are worse in person

I also got a cheaper 3x3 to carry around out and about. Unlike the WeiLong, which I splurged on, the Shengshou Legend was cheap and the quality matched. It wasn't as smooth and the stickers were awful, both in terms of thickness and color scheme. Still, it turned well enough.

After several weeks of playing with the 3x3x3, I finally decided to graduate up. The 4x4x4, I heard, had a point at which it could be solved as a 3x3. It'd be no problem to learn the additional stuff and master that too, right?

I replaced the white stickers with black

Almost.

Thankfully, owing to my experience with the 3x3, learning to solve the 4x4 only took a day, more or less. I SAY more or less because going up to the 4x4 brings a new problem: the dreaded parity error/problem. Long story short, these are situations in which cause certain cubies (the individual cubes on a puzzle) to be in the wrong place. The usual algorithms won't work, so you have to use super long and complex ones to fix the problem.

It's no fun.

One of the fun things of 3x3x3s is being able to amaze and astound random people by solving it multiple times while they watch. With the 4x4x4, I'm just not confident enough that I can fix any random parity error it gives me.

Anyway, I just wanted to share. Cubing is a new hobby for me, but a potentially risky one: I'm at 3 cubes but I'm already looking into getting a 2x2x2, 5x5x5 or even a Megaminx (a dodecahedron).

The challenging and difficult 1x1x1 is also a possibility.

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Photos from thecubicle.us and speedcubeshop.com