How to solve the gear ball

The gearball is a 3x3x3 variant with a geared mechanism that ensures that opposite faces must be moved in tandem. The physical mechanism itself is interesting, but as a puzzle is it significantly simpler than a standard 3x3x3 cube.

I'm going to show you how to solve the Gear Ball Rubik's Cube. Even though it says that it is rated 5 stars for difficulty, it is literally easier than the 2x2. In this tutorial, I'll be using orange. Bring the edges of your color up to the center. Here it gets a little difficult and time consuming. I create my own algorithms, so in my tutorials, I will be using them.

How to solve the gear ball

Last Updated: September 9, This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Christopher M. Osborne, PhD. Christopher Osborne has been a wikiHow Content Creator since His scholarly publications and presentations focus on his research interests in early American history, but Chris also enjoys the challenges and rewards of writing wikiHow articles on a wide range of subjects. This article has been viewed 78, times. Learn more You can try solving the Gear Ball randomly, but a defined strategy works better. Try matching the corners and centers of each face, then use several repeated sets of turns also called algorithms to bring all the colors into alignment. Skip to Content. Edit this Article.

All rights reserved. Find a group of 4 interior pieces that need to switch locations.

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These gears rotate when you twist the puzzle, adding another layer of complexity to solving it. This article will break down simple ways to solve a gear ball and become a master at this mechanical puzzle. Basic notation comprises six letters, where capital letters represent a clockwise turn and lowercase letters represent counter-clockwise:. Decide on which two colors will be your opposite sides and position them across from each other using degree turns. After solving the opposite side centers, arrange the remaining center pieces on their proper sides. Use a corner-swapping algorithm to move the corners to their correct positions with respect to the center colors. Now, with all other pieces in their correct positions, solve the edge pieces one by one. Pay attention to gear rotations while swapping them. Often it is helpful to start by solving adjacent edges and then moving on to diagonal ones.

How to solve the gear ball

I'm going to show you how to solve the Gear Ball Rubik's Cube. Even though it says that it is rated 5 stars for difficulty, it is literally easier than the 2x2. In this tutorial, I'll be using orange. Bring the edges of your color up to the center. Here it gets a little difficult and time consuming. I create my own algorithms, so in my tutorials, I will be using them. BL would mean Back side Left, where you would turn the back of the cube left. This means you do not need to move the cube around or face another side, unless instructed. If you are a little confused, just leave a comment at the end. So, you may have your first side complete, or, like the picture above, you may have some other colors in the corners of your face.

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Finally we are ready to fix the gears. The gearball is a 3x3x3 variant with a geared mechanism that ensures that opposite faces must be moved in tandem. Just manually fix them by pulling apart the two adjacent corners and rotating the gear. More References 7. By signing up you are agreeing to receive emails according to our privacy policy. Picture 3. Report abuse. Trending Articles. Learn more Got it. Move them around until they are the other 2 corners in the same face as your starting 2 corners for instance, all 4 corners in the face will be red. You now have two choices: apply the edge-swapper in the current orientation, or rotate the entire puzzle clockwise by 90 degrees and apply the edge-swapper. You can try solving the Gear Ball randomly, but a defined strategy works better. Here it gets a little difficult and time consuming. Simply by observing a single corner you can determine whether the entire state is "even" or "odd".

I still remember when Oskar van Deventer presented the prototype of the Gear Cube the first time on YouTube in the summer of Back then he called it Caution Cube because one time his finger got stuck between the sharp gears and wounded his fingers.

For instance, say the blue face is facing you, with the yellow face above and the purple face below it. Did this article help you? Thus the meat of the puzzle really only has 64 states. It turns out that at this point you have locked down enough of both the even and odd corner groups that the other two red corners can be easily rotated to the face with the red center. Watch Articles. In theory this would still be a fairly large number of states: given four corners you could have 4x3x2x1 permutations times 3x3x3x3 rotations of each corner independently. In the Gearball, however, opposite faces are rotated in tandem, and thus every corner is affected by every move. Furthermore, the permutation of any two groups completely determines the permutation of the third, thus there are only a total of 16 possible edge permutations. The gearball looks complicated, and it can be hard to see where you are at until you get used to looking at the strange pieces. No problem. If any edges need to be flipped it should be possible to orient the puzzle such that a single application of edge-flipper fixes all of the edges. Co-authored by Christopher M. Instead of worrying about permutations of 8 elements, we only have to consider two sets of permutations of 4 elements each. Find other sets of interiors to switch with R2-U-R2-U.