My Favorite Puzzle
Asa Grigsby (12, USA)
Everybody likes a good puzzle. They’re hard, challenging, and once you solve it, it feels like you’re on top of the world.
The definition of a puzzle according to Merriam Webster’s Dictionary says, “a game, toy, or problem designed to test ingenuity or knowledge.” I don’t know what the writer of this definition was thinking when they made this definition, but they were probably thinking of the Square One.
The Square One is a perfect fit for the definition of a puzzle. It definitely tests ingenuity too, because this is one of the hardest puzzles I’ve ever tried to solve. That’s what makes this one my absolute favorite. I have a really bad Calvin’s Puzzle, but it’s still super fun to solve on it. While watching the tutorial, I remember watching in doubt that I would ever finish it. It was truly challenging. The first time I tried to solve it, I popped one of the corner pieces out and I couldn’t put it back in. That was the end of then my Square One journey until my Dad fixed it again.
When it was fixed, for the next two nights I tried repeatedly to try and solve it. For the first night, most of it was struggling on turning It back into a cube and learning the notation (notation was the hardest part for me). The second night, I breezed through the rest of the tutorial until I got to parity. When I was cubing at this part, I had never solved parity. And when I saw the notation, my jaw dropped in awe how long it was. But I was determined to do it, and at the end of the night, I had memorized it! It really wasn’t that hard for me, so I was really happy about that.
The sole fact that I was able to memorize parity easy on it is also one of the reasons it is my favorite. The last reason it is my favorite puzzle is because many other people can’t solve it. I thought most cubers could solve a Square One since I could, but while I was browsing through cubing accounts on Instagram, I frequently found accounts that couldn’t solve it even though they had the cube. This is one of the three reasons why I love the Square One.