Blindfolded, briefly

You look at a scrambled cube for as long as you like, put on a blindfold, and solve it without looking again. The clock runs throughout, so memorisation is part of the time. The best in the world do the whole thing in under fifteen seconds. A first success usually takes a few minutes and a fortnight of evenings to arrive at.

It is worth a lesson here for one reason: it is the natural home of the commutators you have taken up, and it is the cheapest way to make them stick.

Nothing is solved in order

A blind solve does not build a cross or a layer. One piece is chosen as the buffer — a fixed position, not a fixed piece — and everything happens through it. You look at what is sitting in the buffer, work out where that piece belongs, and send it there. Whatever comes back into the buffer is the next thing you deal with.

That turns a scramble into a list. Each position on the cube gets a letter, and the solve becomes a sequence of letters — where the buffer piece goes, then where the new buffer piece goes, and so on until the cycle closes. Eleven or so letters for the edges, seven or eight for the corners.

Two ways to execute

The traditional route is Old Pochmann, and it needs two algorithms you already have. Set the target position up so it sits where a known permutation will swap it with the buffer, run the permutation, undo the setup. Then the next letter.

The cost of Old Pochmann is turns. Every letter is a setup, a permutation of fourteen or seventeen turns, and the setup undone — so an execution runs to three hundred turns and beyond. It is reliable, it needs almost nothing new, and it will get you a first success.

The fast route is three-style: instead of one target at a time, you take them two at a time with a commutator. Three pieces cycle — the buffer and both targets — in eight to twelve turns rather than forty. A whole solve comes down to something like a third of the turning.

Memorising the list

Twenty letters do not stay in your head as letters. They are taken in pairs, and each pair is turned into a word or an image — two letters, one picture — and the pictures are hung along a route you know well: the rooms of your house, the walk to work. Recall the route and the pictures come back in order.

1. Corners first. Eight pieces, five or six letters, one journey. A corners-only blind solve is a real achievement and it comes in about a week.
2. Then edges. Twice the letters and the same technique, which is why doing corners first is the sensible order.
3. Then both, sighted. Memorise properly, then solve with your eyes open and check the letters as you go. It catches the memory mistakes without wasting an attempt.
4. Then the blindfold. By this point the only new thing is the dark.

What it does to your cubing

You stop seeing faces. A cube stops being six coloured sides and becomes twenty pieces with places to be, which is what it was all along and what the very first lesson on this site said. Most people find their sighted solving improves for reasons they cannot quite point to.

It is also the least equipment-dependent thing in cubing. No fast turning, no tension tuning, no timer pressure — a chair, a cube and a strip of cloth, and something worth being pleased about at the end of it.