# Background

Many years ago in school, I was gifted an original Rubik's cube. It
greatly fascinated me, but I had a hard time figuring out how to solve
it. I still remember how I once peeled off the stickers in a fit of
frustration and reapplied them...

Some weeks later I found a book at the school library explaining how
to solve the cube and started seriously studying it. I don't remembers
its name, only that it was black/white and had some seriously silly
algorithms, but it helped me get most of the part there. For the rest,
I used the algorithms from the solutions booklet shipped with the
puzzle (the first part with making the cross did not make much sense
to me and the book taught a method focusing on the corners, so go
figure...)

# Steps

1. Locate the four white corners and place them around the center
   piece. For example, you could start with the white-red-blue one,
   then add the matching next corner to its left/right (for example
   white-red-green, then white-green-orange and finally
   white-orange-blue).
2. Solve the first layer by placing the white edges between the
   previously rotated corners.
3. Ensure that the remaining four corners are permutated correctly,
   swapping them if needed.
4. Solve the second layer by placing the four edges by applying the
   same algorithm as in step 3 twice.
5. Orient the corners of the last layer with an algorithm that twists
   3 corners at once.
6. Solve the last layer by using two algorithms that move 3 edges and
   orient 2 of them.

Steps 5 and 6 were taken from the official solutions booklet. It took
me a long time to wrap my head around them and it was awkward to have
to repeatedly use them until ready to continue with the next step.
Step 6 was particularly weird since I had to use the clockwise and
counter-clockwise algorithm in succession until spotting the winning
condition that allowed me to break the tie. Another oddity is that the
cube was not flipped on its head the entire time, requiring me to
peek under its bottom side after executing an algorithm.

Owing to this and the overall bad quality of the cube, I never had
times better than 4-5 minutes and got discouraged. Many years later I
bought a LanLan void cube (it looked very cool to me) and ignored the
warnings of another speedcuber that it was of very bad quality. They
turned out to be right, somehow the cube forced a corners first
approach (due to the missing center pieces) and managed to be even
worse to operate than the original Rubik's cube. For this reason I
completely stopped caring about cubes, until many years later...

# Algorithms

TODO