A cube also has twelve edges, so there are six pairs of opposite edges. For a spindle going through the centres of two opposite edges, the only possibility is a rotation of 180˚. This gives six rotations, one for each pair of opposite edges. Finally a cube also has eight corners, so there are four pairs of opposite corners.
- Imad: Say I open the drawing and the view cube already looks like it does in my first picture - I can easily save a default view to 0 degrees rotation but I still need to.
- R = rotz(ang) creates a 3-by-3 matrix used to rotate a 3-by-1 vector or 3-by-N matrix of vectors around the z-axis by ang degrees. When acting on a matrix, each column of the matrix represents a different vector. For the rotation matrix R and vector v, the rotated vector is given by R.v.
We use letters to describe a rotation on the cube. Learn to read the Rubik's Cube Notation and you'll be able to perform all algorithms you see in the solution tutorials. The good news is that learning onlyif six intuitive letters is sufficient to solve the cube but if you are a speedcuber you should learn the advanced notation which you can access from this page.
Face rotations
A single letter by itself refers to a clockwise face rotation in 90 degrees (quarter turn):
F R U L B D
A letter followed by an apostrophe means to turn that face counterclockwise 90 degrees:
F' R' U' L' B' D'
A letter with the number 2 after it marks a double turn (180 degrees):
F2 R2 U2 L2 B2 D2
An example algorithm R U R' U R U2 R' U
Explained: R U R' U R U2 R' U
There is another commonly used notation where the uppercase means a clockwise and lowercase means a counterclockwise turn, but this is not the official version because for other twisty puzzles the lowercase letter marks a different thing.
e.g. R U r U R U2 r U
Sometimes they mark the inverse rotations with the capital face initial followed by a lowercase i
e.g. Fi means front inverted.
For the beginner's method you just have to know the simple F (front), B (back), R (right), L (left), D (down), U (up) turns but there are more complicated moves for speedcubers which manipulate the middle layer or two layers at the same time or reorient the whole cube.
The interactive widget features a 3D cube to demonstrate the Singmaster notation, but unfortunately this is not yet supported in all browsers. If your computer can't render this HTML5 Rubik's Cube properly please see the one in the box below.
The faces of the cube marked with their initials
Click the buttons to animate the rotations:
Comments
Rotating Centres
This page is being provided for those who have their own method of solving the cube that does not always solve it with correctly oriented centres and do not want to spend time learning a method that sets the centre orientations correctly in the solution.
Z Rotation Cubing
One hundred and eighty degree rotation (Algorithm set 1)
| This algorithm rotates the up face centre 180 degrees |
| U | L | R | U2 | L' | R' | U | L | R | U2 | L' | R' | Up face
Clockwise | Left face
Clockwise | Right face
Clockwise | Up face
Clockwise | Up face
Clockwise | Left face
Anti-clock | Right face
Anti-clock | Up face
Clockwise | Left face
Clockwise | Right face
Clockwise | Up face
Clockwise | Up face
Clockwise | Left face
Anti-clock | Right face
Anti-clock |
|
Z Rotation Cubing
NOTE: This algorithm is made up of a series of 7 rotations performed twice, so it is only half as bad as it looks.
