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Does the Rubik's Cube in this painting have a solved state?

Puzzling Asked on June 4, 2021

This is an image of a Rubik’s Cube I found in the Men’s Toilets during the first day of a big Scrabble tournament.

This position is impossible for the standard Rubik’s Cube (White/Red/Blue opposite Yellow/Orange/Green respectively) for any number of reasons.

Is this position legal for at least one non-standard Rubik’s Cube? (i.e. with different permutation of White/Red/Blue/Yellow/Orange/Green)?

enter image description here

2 Answers

Oo, this is a good one. Let's do some analysis:

We can see the centres of three sides, and the relative positions of the centres cannot be changed, so we know that when/if this cube is solved, the blue side will be adjacent to green and orange.

We can also see a blue-white edge piece, and a blue-yellow edge piece as well. This means that as long as the cube has a solved state,

Then, we can take note of the following facts about solved Rubik's cubes in general:

  1. There are always exactly two corner pieces between any two adjacent colours
  2. Out of these pieces, one has the two colours next to each other in a clockwise order, the other piece has them in anticlockwise order

It follows from these two facts that if we

  1. see two sides of a corner piece, and
  2. we know where those two colours are on the cube,

then we can uniquely place that corner piece on the solved cube.

Doing so, and remembering what we learned about red above, we notice that

Because of this,

Correct answer by Bass on June 4, 2021

I'm new here, and I might be wrong, but...

Can it really be that easy?

Answered by the-baby-is-you on June 4, 2021

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