SudoKube

When the Vonns came to visit us here in Maryland, where the coolest thing we have is spikey plants (see last post and resulting comments) they left us a cross between a Rubik's Cube and a Sudoku. The idea is to twist and adjust it so that each face has the numbers one through nine. Fortunately, the one through nine rule does not have to follow along one line between faces (I looked up the rules online). This makes sense because there are four faces along one line which means twelve squares and that's three more than allowed. Anyways, so they challenged Kyle to solve it since he is the Rubik's Cube Master.

To Be Honest, Kyle didn't find the idea too appealing. He wasn't interested. And you can't really get Kyle to do something he's not interested in doing. But I was interested. My only problem was that I can't solve Rubik's Cubes. I'm not patient enough to figure out the method and the three dimensional thinking is not really my thing. But I do have other resources - I have Kyle.

I hit on the solution fairly quickly once I realized that. If I could figure out where each square was supposed to go, Kyle could put it there. So I would simply have to label each square somehow and hand it over to Kyle.

But First Step: I had to solve it.
Then I realized the next key to the solution. I thought about how the manufacturers make these cubes to sell. If they do it like a Rubik's Cube, then it comes already solved. And since they want to sell the most possible cubes, they make them aesthetically pleasing. That means, all the numbers are oriented in the same direction. Also, based on how people think, there would be a "top," four "side" faces oriented in the same up-down orientation, and a bottom. Therefore I now had two clues to help me solve it: one through nine on each face and each face oriented in the same direction.
I decided on using my favorite tool - Excel. Its easier then erasing all the time and its in grid shape already.

Well, to shorten a rather lengthy, blow by blow explanation, I used the corners and the orientation theory to determine the top and bottom, then the edges and middle pieces using a combination of orientation and 1-9 rule.

Second Step: Relabel it.
Easy enough. I took some masking tape and covered up each number and put a letter corresponding with each color of the Rubik's cube.

Third Step: Have Kyle Solve It.

We ran into a few hold ups. First of all, there were two 1's as middle pieces. Kyle says I had them labeled wrong. So he fixed it.

Then he told me the boys had pulled it apart and put it back together. One of the corner pieces was flipped into the wrong orientation. So he fixed that too. And then he finished solving it.

Step 4: Remove Labels.

And it's Solved! TaDa!

And so that you know I'm not lying.