Hands
- Drag across a face to turn that layer. Let go and it settles to the nearest quarter turn.
- Drag the empty space to look around. Pinch or scroll to move closer.
- With a mouse, hold the right button and drag to turn the whole cube. The keys X, Y and Z do the same.
- Scramble mixes it, Solve plays the fix, Hint lights up the next layer to turn.
- Scramble, then solve it yourself: each stage you finish is marked. On a 3×3 that is the cross, the first layer, two layers, the top face, then solved.
The room
- The arcade by the wall has five games: Snake, Bricks, Paddle, Rocks and Flap. Tap the cabinet, or the joystick at the top. Tap a game to pick it, then tap it again to play.Click the cabinet, or the joystick at the top, then click a game.
- Paper toss: tapclick the can, or the ball at the top. Flick up to throw.Drag up and let go to throw. The breeze changes every throw. The arrow and bars at the top show which way and how hard. On a keyboard, hold Space and watch the bar: it is your power. Let go to throw. The left and right arrows aim.
- The cube at the top brings you back.
Keys
| U D L R F B | Turn a face clockwise. Add Shift to turn it back. |
| M E S | Turn a middle slice (odd sizes). |
| X Y Z | Rotate the whole cube. |
| 1 2 3 | The cube, the arcade, paper toss. |
| ← → ↑ ↓ · Space | At the arcade: steer · play, serve, fire. At the toss: aim · throw. |
| Ctrl Z · Ctrl Shift Z | Undo · redo. |
| Space | On the Timer tab, start a solve. |
| H | Show a hint (3×3). |
| C · P | Cinema mode · photo mode. |
| Esc | Leave cinema, skip a sequence, stop typed moves, close a panel. In a game, back to the list of games. At the arcade or the toss, back to the cube. |
Notation
Each letter names a face: Up, Down, Left, Right, Front, Back. A letter alone is a clockwise quarter turn as you look at that face. A prime (R′) turns it back, a 2 (R2) turns it halfway. A lowercase letter or a w (r, Rw) turns two layers together. On bigger cubes, a number picks a deeper layer: 2R is the second layer in from the right. Brackets group moves: (R U R′ U′)2 plays the group twice, and (R U)′ plays it backwards.
The numbers
A 3×3 cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 positions. In 2010 Tomas Rokicki, Herbert Kociemba, Morley Davidson and John Dethridge proved that every one of them can be solved in 20 moves or fewer, counting a half turn as one move. Counting quarter turns only, the limit is 26, proved by Rokicki and Davidson in 2014. Ernő Rubik built the first cube in 1974.
Solve uses Kociemba’s two-phase method. It usually finds a solution of 18 to 22 moves in under half a second.