THE STORY — NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING
Ten numbers that explain the whole obsession.
None of these are needed to solve one — the solver on this site does that regardless. They're here because once you know how the cube is actually built, the fact that anyone can hold a fully-scrambled one and put it back stops being a trick and starts being obvious.
43,252,003,274,
489,856,000
Positions a 3×3 can take. One per second since the Big Bang and you would still be nowhere near the end.
20 MOVES
The most any position ever needs, proven by exhaustive computer search in 2010. Every scramble is twenty moves from home — finding which twenty is the hard part.
1 IN 12
Chance that a cube taken apart and reassembled at random can be solved at all. Eleven times out of twelve it is mechanically impossible — which is exactly what our validation check is looking for.
~55 MOVES
What the beginner method in the handbook typically costs. Inefficient, memorable, and completely reliable.
6 COLOURS · 1 ARRANGEMENT
Centres never move relative to each other, so on a standard cube white is always opposite yellow, red opposite orange, blue opposite green.
54 STICKERS · 26 PIECES
Six faces of nine stickers each, wrapped around twenty-six small cubes. Only twenty of them ever change position — the six centres are fixed relative to each other from the day the cube is built.
NO TWO PIECES ALIKE
Every edge shows a unique pair of colours and every corner a unique trio. Know any two stickers on a piece and you already know exactly which piece it is — and exactly where it's supposed to end up.
3 WAYS TO TWIST
Every corner can sit in its slot three different ways before it counts as "right side up." That single fact alone triples the size of every position count on this page.
ONE SPINDLE, SIX ARMS
The same basic mechanism — a hidden core with six arms, one per face — has held every 3×3 together since 1974. Refined a hundred times over. Never replaced.
1 OF 43 QUINTILLION
Only one of those positions is solved. Every other one — including whatever yours is in right now — is, by definition, a scramble.