A funny story about the cube
Yohaan Master (10, Singapore)
This incident happened on the sixth of March, earlier this year.
4th grade was reaching its end, and we were more or less passing time till the end of school. Our teachers handed assignments that we finished in the wink of an eye, and finally resigned to giving us free time.
Chaos reigned. Bottles were flipped, airplanes were thrown and for a few of us, Rubik’s cubes were solved. At that time my best friend was reigning champion at solving the cube, and I was out to get a better time than him. I was still using the beginner’s method, i.e. I didn’t know OLL and PLL yet. I was on a lucky streak, and I could skip corner placing. I had only a few moves left and I would have been the new champion. Then my luck ran out. I cut the corner too far and it popped. I reached out to catch it…. And I missed. Instead, I punched a boy playing ‘hand cricket’ next to me in the face.
The boy glared at me. With a sinking feeling I realized he was on the school martial arts team.
He grabbed my cube and just when I thought he would break it, he started to solve the (now jumbled up) cube. But here’s the thing- he was faster than my friend! In 10 seconds flat he solved the cube (and fixed the corner and all) and tossed it at my stomach.
Later (after he had forgiven me) I asked him how he did it. He told me all about OLL and PLL and wrote down the algorithms in my notebook.
He taught me three look last layer, with two OLL’s. That got me thinking- could i really memorise 57 algorithms and do it in one step? Then I started on memorising all 21 PLL cases.
Currently I have memorised 46 of the 57 cases and working on more. So, I guess the reason all this happened is thanks to the bad quality of my first Rubik’s cube!