Message #3736

From: okko.manninen@phnet.fi
Subject: Hello
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2017 10:02:55 +0000

My name is Okko Manninen and I just finished solving the 3x3x3x3. I am 18 years old and I live in Finland. I have studied in high school for two years now and my favorite subjects are math and psychology. I finished my first Rubick’s cube when I was 8 years old. I have about 30 cubes (mostly 3x3) and 5x5 is my biggest. I haven’t bought any bigger cubes because they are expensive but I will get more someday. My free time goes mostly playing games like League of legends and pokemon go. I am a gamer but I like to use brains and I enjoy challenges.

That’s it for the introduction so let’s get to the solve.

I found this challenge through mathologer’s video and I belive that is quite self explanatory. Most important thing in my solve was "The ultimate solution to a 3x3x3x3." Completing the cross in step 1 was surprisingly difficult for me. I’m not sure why but it took some time for me to understand what actually was the cross. After I understood which pieces I was trying to solve the cross became fairly simple. Step 2 was simple and straight forward. Step 3 was almost simple. I finished the first 3 steps in one sitting and I started step 4 too.

Now step 4 was the hardest part for me. It took some time to succesfully start moving pieces to their corresponding position. After I started succeeding I was really happy again because I was making progress again. That joy didn’t last too long. I started to feel like I wasn’t doing any progress. I was disassembling correctly placed peaces. I read the guide like 6 times and I watched mathloggers video second time. This was really hard part for me but eventually after loading the log file again and again I figured it out.

After succeeding in step four I was sure I could do step 5 with fairly ease. In theory step 5 was similar to step 4 and they bought used same principle. It was evening and I couldn’t get sleep because I was excited to finish the puzzle. I was only thinking about the finale when I was laying in bed. During the next day I finished it without any major problems. I don’t really know what is the correct way to orient the pieces but I figured how to turn the corner with 2 steps. Using Roice Nelson’s way those 2 moves were as follows.

Back, 5, Right
Back, 11, Right

If the corner wasn’t correctly I just repeated those 2 moves. Few repetitions and finished. Little pop up notification and all that is left to do is email my log file. I receive email and I start writing to this group. And now my message is almost ready.

I started solving 3x3x3x3x3 using MC7D and I just finished my 2-color pieces. If anyone got any tips for the 3-color pieces that are really close to each other I would love to hear them. If I highlight 1 of them, the system will highlight 4 colors even though I have 4-color pieces turned off. I will figure it out eventually but it would be great if someone could explain this phenomena.

Grammatical errors in my text should be ignored.

Don’t stop after 3x3x3x3. Go beyond that.