To set the record straight: according to a newly-rediscovered ledger from 1980-83 (found by ^z's better half in an old desk) a comment in ^zhurnal RubikCubism1 (16 March 2001) is incorrect. Three months ago I wrote:
On 20 September 1980 I took part in a Cube competition held by a local department store. The store had offered $100 gift certificates to anyone who could solve a Cube in under five minutes. I was the seventh to succeed that morning; there were a bunch of students from the University of Maryland there ahead of me. The store didn't keep its promise ... all I got was a T-shirt.
But my ledger indicates that the store did in fact (two weeks later) mail the gift certficate to me. Apparently the notes I relied on in March had been written before the reward arrived, and my memory was incomplete. (It still is; I have no recollection of the certificate and no idea what I bought with it. Clothes, or something equally ephemeral?) The ledger entry also records that it took me 4.5 minutes to do the job, and that my algorithm to attack the Rubik's Cube began with getting the edge cubelets into their correct places, bottom-to-top, followed by putting the corners into position, and finally working to orient the corners properly.
Nowadays I'm sadly out of practice on the Cube; I can recall the general principles but not enough of the specific moves to solve one efficiently. My time would probably be half an hour or so. Cubis fugit...
Friday, July 06, 2001 at 04:57:23 (EDT) = 2001-07-06
(correlates: RubikCubism1, MagnaFortuna, MerleZimmermann, ...)