Rubik's Cube - Orienting the Last Layer Edges

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Bob Burton
http://www.cubewhiz.com  
 

Bob has been solving Rubik's Cubes since 2001 and competed in over twenty official contests all over the world. He has held several world records and national titles for Rubik's puzzles, including the Rubik's Magic and Square-1. He currently averages about twenty seconds to solve a Rubik's Cube with a personal best of 13 seconds. He has even solved the puzzle blindfolded in several official competitions. At Rutgers University, Bob founded the RU Rubik's Cube Club, which hosted official competitions twice each year, attracting competitors from all over the country in addition to several international competitors. He has also developed several fingertricks for Rubik's Cube algorithms that are used by some of the fastest speedcubers in the world. Bob is also the webmaster for cubewhiz.com, a site designed for speedcubers to learn new tricks and become faster.  Bob is a math teacher at a high school in New York City. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Rutgers University and is currently pursuing a M.A. in mathematics education from the City College of New York. He also has a great interest in the sciences, especially physics and chemistry.  Bob currently lives with his family in Kearny, New Jersey.

Rubik's Cube - Orienting the Last Layer Edges

This video shows how to orient the last layer edges of the Rubik's cube puzzle.

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Transcripts

I am Bob Burton, Rubik's Cube Expert, and I am teaching you how to solve a Rubik's Cube. Now that we have solved the first two layers, we are ready to move on to the orientation of the last layer edges of the Rubik's cube. What that means is essentially solving a yellow cross. There are three cases. In the first case we have a bar. If we have a bar, what we do is we move the front layer clockwise. Then using the right and top layers, we move the right layer up, top layer to the left, right layer down, and top layer to the right. Then we just restore the front of the Rubik's cube by putting the white back to the bottom. Thats given us a yellow cross. At this point we are still ignoring corners, so we dont really care what they look like. Another case that we can have is, instead of a bar, we have a little L. Again, ignoring corners, we may have yellow in some of these corners, but to solve the L, we put it in the front and right positions. Take the front two layers and move them clockwise. Then again, using the right and top layers, we move the right side up, up side to the left, right side down, and top side to the right. Then we restore the front two layers by putting white to the bottom. The last case is, if we have just a dot in the middle. We don't have any of the last layer edges of the Rubik's cube oriented. To solve that, we first pretend that we have the bar, move the front layer clockwise. Using the right layer and the top layer, we go up, left, down, right, and restore the front layer. We then get the L. We solve that front two layers; up, left, down, right, and restore the front two layers. We are now ready to move on to orientation of the last layer corners of the Rubik's cube.

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