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Comment by benniomars | Hacker News Reader

How is this easier to understand? And is the Rubik's Cuber hard to understand at all?

You got 26 cubes in 3D space that need to go to their correct locations. They can move in 3 axis. They are color coded for recognition.

I think anyone is able to solve the first 2 layers intuitively. Just start by following one of those 26 little cubes and see how it moves about.

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Exactly this. It's not just rubik's cubes, it's also very easy to, for example, use just a few lines of bash to implement a stable, featureful sync tool like dropbox. Everyone's always making things seem more complicated than they really are.

I genuinely can't tell if you're being sardonic here. This being HN, I guess I have to assume you're being earnest.

Mentioning Dropbox is the key to it being sarcastic.

Like someone saying “less space than a nomad. Lame.”

yep sorry, the Dropbox reference is a long-standing HN inside joke about comments like these. You can probably search to find the whole history of this reference, it's rather amusing.

long-standing HN inside joke

It's more of a worn-out trope by this point and better skipped. Just sneerfully flag lame comments.

I know the meme, which is why I was wondering, haha :) It's also the sort of thing that could've been meant entirely sincerely, in line with the comment of the person you were responding, being particularly painful to me as I've always had a massive mental block with Rubiks Cubes!

Dark [Rubik's] Magic that they are.

Er... what? I don't understand how this is related at all. And yes, I know about the famous Dropbox HN comment.

I agree with the other commenter that a normal 3D cube feels much more intuitive and simple. I guess it's just personal preference/thinking style.

I'm sure it was just a typo but in case it confuses somebody reading your comment: 27 cubes, not 26 :)

The cube in the center doesn’t exist

Then it was me who was confused, thanks for the correction :)

The cube in the center would beg to differ.

It exists. (Well, as a matter of the mechanics of the physical object, there is no center cube, but the other parts aren't cubes either.)

But it is not one of the cubes that need to go to their correct locations. The center cube is not moved by any operation on the cube; it is always in its correct location.

Center cube is not moved, but it is rotated. However, since it does not have any colored faces then it's rotations are meaningless.

If the cubes have correct locations, none of them need to have colored faces. The location is enough.

(At least, that's true of the 26 outer cubes. You can't get them all into place without simultaneously aligning them correctly. I don't actually know if correct alignment of the center cube is also required, but it'd be my first guess.)

That's provably false - I witnessed it many times when solving the cube myself. Colored faces determine orientation, in addition to location. In the Rubik solving method that I know (a simple method for amateurs, not remotely close to professional speed cubing methods) there's actually a late stage where ALL the cubes are in their correct locations, except some of the third layer corners might have a wrong orientation - there's a dedicated sequence of turns that allows to solve that.

By the same logic, there are 6 more invisible cubes, 1 above each face. Where does it end?

The center cube is obviously part of the mental model of the cube, the Platonic object that the physical object is supposed to represent.

Nobody believes there are invisible cubes outside the Rubik's cube. That's not the same logic; that's you trying and failing to imagine a problem with the idea that cutting a cube into three parts along each of its three axes will generate a hidden central subcube.

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