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Comment by timjver | Hacker News Reader

Simply twisting a single corner piece or flipping a single edge piece achieves that already, without having to mess with the stickers.

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Messing with the stickers makes it impossible to solve by simply twisting the corner piece back!

Not true.

Take a solved cube and twist a corner. Now jumble the cube and try to solve.

Do you see the problem Now?

I think the parent commenter's point was that if you change stickers, you can't solve the cube, even if you twist corners. But if you twist corners, you can still "solve" the cube by changing stickers.

i.e. changing stickers is "more powerful" than twisting corners.

Stickker lermutation a larger algebraic group. Sticker permutation is S_54. The largest you can get whike still looking like a standard twisty cube.

...the same is true for swapping two stickers on a corner.

If you alter the sequence of colours, you alter the finished pattern.

Therefore rendering the cube unsolvable.

QED

To be pedantic, we can "alter the sequence of colors" of a solved state into a solvable state, so it's not quite QED.

Anyway, I think you're agreeing with the person you're responding to; they're suggesting it's more fun to peel and re-stick stickers precisely because that's a way to achieve states that even mechanical disassembly can't solve.

Hence the clarification of only swapping TWO stickers on a corner. ;-)

Wasn't I already being pedantic enough about "Or peeling two stickers off a corner piece and swapping them to change the parity and make it impossible to solve."?

If you really want to make it physically impossible to solve and frustrating, swap two stickers between two cubes so they both have the wrong number of two colors, especially annoying with two colors on different faces of the same piece.

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