CRAZY Rubik's Cube Designer

[WonderSeeker]

This is mostly a response to @Leo Gura in his latest blog post. At about 13:20 he was talking about how he used to brainstorm new Rubik's cube designs. I chuckled a bit because there's this one creator I used to follow. The puzzles he makes are utterly ridiculous and jaw-dropping. Oskar van Daventer:

 

 

[Yarco]

This is what mastery is all about. First step is just realizing the incredible depth that already exists in many seemingly-shallow fields.

My coworkers used to always be amazed that I could solve a Rubik's cube in under 1 minute. They thought I was cheating and would bring in their own cubes from home and scramble it themselves LOL. Such things are unfathomable to most people, when really it just takes watching some tutorial videos, memorizing a handful of patterns, and practicing for a couple of weeks.

Also shows the difference between consciously evaluating something vs coming at it mindlessly. You can play with a Rubik's cube as a kid and never have many of the realizations needed to solve it. I played with this thing for hours as a kid without ever realizing that there are different types of pieces in the cube, or that certain colors are stuck with other colors and can only move in a certain way. Most people try to mindlessly solve a Rubiks cube through trial and error instead of coming up with systems, or even considering that a system to solve a Rubik's cube could be possible.

Even something as basic as shaving. People assume there is just Gilette Mach 3 razors and shaving cream that you find in stores and that's it. But you can find a community on Reddit with 170,000 members debating what is the best razor, what is the best blade, what is the best shaving soap, what is the best shaving technique, etc. Seemingly mundane daily tasks have been A/B tested and optimized. Turned into a daily ritual, a community, a hobby, or even a profession.

With almost any thing or idea, there are other people who have already made decades of progress toward whatever you want to accomplish. Don't try to start from scratch and be a trailblazer. Look for a community based on the thing you want to do, and take the easy path they've already laid out for you. Otherwise you are literally re-inventing the wheel and adding years to the process.

In the case of making a new type of Rubik's cube, it would be a huge mistake to not study all of Oskar van Daventer's videos. Plus immerse yourself in the speedcubing community, learn the history of cubes and how they have progressed through the years, what makes existing cubes better or worse than others, all of the other designs that already exist, what existing cube designs are most popular for competitions etc. What kind of tangentially-related puzzles like the Rubik's Clock that aren't even cubes already exist.

Edited March 4, 2021 by Yarco