Rubik's Beginner

I've never before memorized the complete set of tricks needed to solve a rubik's cube... until today! My first completion with no reference to my notes took 3 minutes and 5 seconds. Wine and chocolate motivators as pictured.

Rubik's cubes first came out outside Hungary in 1980, when I was 9. A year or two after that, I got my hands on an nth generation photocopy of handwritten instructions for solving one, derived by a mathematically-inclined friend of a friend of my Dad. (The things we used to do before the internet!)

I memorized the first few phases, so have always been able to do the first two layers. But the last parts of that solution involved remembering a couple of 15 or 20 move sequences, which apparently ten-year-old me got bored of, or distracted from, before ever committing to memory.

It turns out that the modern "beginner's method" that I'm reading about today is considerably simpler than that, and is much easier to understand and memorize. So now that lingering childhood inadequacy is vanquished.

(Discussion on Facebook.)