How to solve a Rubik’s cube using free setups for edges and 3 cycle for corners

By Aditya Dargan

Hello cubers this is my Advanced 3 cycle page for Blindfold cubing. I have some requirements though. You should know how to solve A Rubik’s cube blindfolded. That is a big one and secondly you should have a brief Idea of what the 3-cycle method is and how it works. I made this method up my self after some putting some thought into it. It is complicated because you only have 2 steps: Orient+Permute the edges and it goes for the corners. So you might be wondering how to "solve 2 edges at once" Well, if you read on it is quite possible to do so. Unfortunately, I haven’t developed this same method for corners but who cares? You can still use some fast algs for Corner Orientation. Read on folks for the details for the edges and corners in my method I call the A.3.C.

Edges: This part is for the edges, Duh. Okay so I use 2 algs to cycle 3 edges around and "solve 2 of them". M U2 M' U2 and M' U2 M U2. As you can see these are very short algs that are executed faster than most other 3 cycles. I can also use any other alg that cycles 3 edges. This is how the process works: I look at the piece in the FU position. It is either misoriented in the normal 3 cycle way or it is oriented properly. I will go with the correctly oriented scenario. From now on a piece that is oriented correctly will be referred to as a "clean piece" and a misoriented piece will be referred to as an "unclean piece". So that piece in the FU position is a clean piece. I look at where the edge's correct spot is. I set it up in the BU position without using R or L moves because they flip the orientation of the piece and I do not want to do that. After it is setup I look at the current edge in that position and find out where it needs to go and you know the FU and BU spots get solved and the edge piece in the DB position is cycled to the FU position. That is a review of the 3-cycle method. Now what if my FU is an unclean piece? Ok Ok do not panic. What the solution to that is to use a R or L moves to set up the location where the FU unclean edge wants to go. Once that is setup the orientation of that edge that is in the BU spot is flipped because I used an R or L move. Finally I set up my last piece up in the normal way or in the R or L move manner. There!! I spilled the beans of my secret method. I have found this out: Lets say I want to cycle 3 edges on the cube and one of them is correctly oriented and the other 2 are not. So what will be the orientation of the FU piece in the next cycle, well not next cycle but after the flips happen. It is going to be oriented correctly because think about it. Well I didn’t specify the 3-cycle order but it was clean, unclean, and unclean. So the Clean piece makes the 1st Unclean stay Unclean and then the first Unclean flips the orientation of the 2nd Unclean piece so after the setups and the cycling the first piece is correctly oriented and so are the rest of the pieces because they are technically "solved". Well that’s all it is basically. You can email me at aditya.dargan(at)cubegeek.net for more details and I will more than happy to answer your questions. As I said before this method is hard to get but I have given you the major aspects of how it is done. Thank you for reading and please spread the word about this wonderful site.

Example solve of the edges:

Scramble: D U2 R D2 U L' R D U2 L R F' L2 R B2 R' D U2 R2 D2 U2 B2 U' R' D' L' D' B F R(With white on top and green on front). Remember I use an American color scheme cube! Oh yeah! I hold blue in front and yellow on top when I solve blindfolded.

Memorization: I will use numbers to display the memo here, but I usually do it visually. The numbers are used from Macky's website like he explains it. Just read the piece numbering and you will be done. So here it is ( 1-9-7-8) , ( 2-6-10), ( 3-4-5-12). You should understand this. Now I look at the orientation of the edges. Top layer: 1,2,4 Middle layer: 5 and 8, and the bottom layer: just 11. So 6 edges of the total 12 are misoriented.Execution: I will start with the first cycle (1-9-7-8). Before setting up the pieces I should know what orientation and piece the next cycle starts with. So 1 is unclean, 9 is clean, and 7 is clean. Since I have two cleans it means the next cycle begins with an unclean piece. I do an F L' F' to set up edge num. 9. So the orientation of edge 9 is now unclean. Next, I do an R' to set up edge 7. I do R2 U R U R' U' R' U' R' U R'. Then undo the setups. No we have solved 2 edges and as I predicted our edge 1 is unclean. It is a 2 cycle therefore I move on to solving the second cycle. So the cycle is (2-6-10) it has an odd number of pieces so it will move the pieces into their right spots but maybe not solve the number 2 edge. Lets see. 2 is unclean, 6 is clean, 10 is clean. So when the pieces are cycled edge number2 will not be correctly oriented. So I setup the pieces: U2 L B'. The L caused the edge number 6 to flip its orientation so it is misoriented, but when I did the L it already did the R or L move for edge number10. The I do the (423) alg as described on Macky's website (use the first link). I move on to the next cycle ( 3-4-5-12). This cycle is very easy because if I do a y2 and then do a R' I can use the first algo discussed. Now we move on to cleaning up the misoriented edges and solving the 2 2cycles. First lets look how many edges we solve without using the step of EO. We completely solved 6 and 2 of them are in their proper spots but misoriented (edges 2 and 11). Still we solved half of them. I do a U' B2 to setup the edges 2 and 11 for the 2 edge flipping alg. You should know it. Do the alg and reverse your setup. I next do these moves: U R F' B to use the H perm. I do the F' and B because I did an R and the orientation of edge 3 was ruined so I had to also had to ruin the orientation of edge 12. That is it all 12 edges are completely solved without using more than 1 alg of EO. In conclusion, if you keep track of what orientation your first piece has while cycling blindfolded you should not have much of a problem using the A.3.C. Remember the flipping and you should do OK. Give it a shot! Keep trying and email me at aditya.dargan(at)cubegeek.net for any questions. Happy BLD cubing!!!