2x2 Rubik's Cube Online – 3D Pocket Cube Simulator

Turning the virtual 2x2: drags, keys and buttons

The virtual 2x2 takes three kinds of input, and you can mix them in the middle of a solve:

• Drag a sticker Press on any sticker and pull it the way it should travel. The layer under it makes one quarter turn, however far you pull. A press in the gap between stickers picks the nearest one, so small screens need no careful aim.
• Type a face letter U, D, L, R, F and B turn the up, down, left, right, front and back faces clockwise as seen from that face; add Shift for counter-clockwise. There is no half-turn key, so U2 is U pressed twice.
• Tap a move button Twelve buttons, from U to B′, each marked with a dot in its face color, turn the outer faces with a single tap.

A plain tap on a sticker does nothing, so looking around never turns a layer by accident. To see the back, drag the empty area around the cube or use two fingers on a touch screen.

How a 2 by 2 works: eight corners and no centers

A 2x2 is a 3x3 with the edges and centers taken away. Only the eight corners are visible; inside, a hidden core holds them together and lets any half of the cube turn against the other half. Each corner has three stickers, so the puzzle shows 24 in all.

With no centers, nothing marks which color belongs on which side. Turning the top face clockwise and turning the bottom face clockwise leave the eight corners in exactly the same arrangement relative to each other; only the way the whole cube points has changed. The same holds for right and left, and for front and back. That is why the simulator accepts a solved cube in any orientation: it only asks whether every face shows a single color. You can use the idea while you play. Keep the corner at the bottom, back and left still, turn only the right, top and front faces, and you will never lose track of how the cube is held.

How the Pocket Cube simulator picks a scramble

Scramble jumps straight to a new position with no animation, and the sequence behind it is not displayed. It is a random-state scramble: rather than making a fixed number of random turns, the simulator picks one position out of every position the puzzle can reach, each one as likely as the next.

For a cube without centers, that means leaving the corner at the bottom, back and left in place and dealing out the other seven: 5,040 ways to arrange them, times 729 ways to twist them, or 3,674,160 positions. Fixing one corner loses nothing, because any other position is one of these seen from another side. A typical scramble lands nine moves from solved, though a beginner’s solution of it runs to a few dozen. Reset returns the cube to solved, and both buttons clear the move history.

2x2 vs 3x3: what carries over

Everything you learn on the 2x2 is a corner skill, and the 3x3 uses the same corners. The last-layer steps of the usual 3x3 beginner method, turning the yellow corners up and then moving them into place, are the same cases you solve on a Pocket Cube, often with the same algorithms. What the 2x2 does not prepare you for is edges: the 3x3 adds twelve of them and six fixed centers, so a first layer there means a cross before the corners.

The other difference runs the opposite way. On a 3x3 the centers tell you which color each face must end up, while on a 2x2 you decide that yourself from the first corner you place. Players moving up usually find the 3x3 longer rather than harder to understand. When you are ready, the virtual Rubik’s cube is one click away.

Racing the clock on a virtual 2x2

Tick Time my solve and a Timer readout appears beside Moves. The clock does not start when you tick the box or when you scramble; it waits for your first turn, so you can rotate the view and plan your first layer for as long as you like. As soon as a scrambled cube shows one color on every face, the clock stops and the line under the move history reads, for example, “Solved in 31 moves and 48.26.”

Undo keeps the clock running and takes one off the move count, so the final number is the moves you kept rather than the moves you tried. These times live only on the page. For a record of real 2x2 solves with a fresh scramble each time and Ao5 and Ao12 averages, switch the cube timer to its 2x2 mode.

From the virtual 2x2 to the solver and back

Solve this state opens the 2x2 Rubik’s cube solver with your current position already filled in. All 24 stickers travel in the link, so there is nothing to paint. There, Optimal shows the shortest way back to solved, never more than eleven moves, and Beginner, step by step breaks the rest of your solve into three stages with an explanation for each. The solver’s Play with this cube button brings the position straight back here, so you can try the suggested moves on the virtual cube before trusting them on your real one. To learn those three stages properly, the guide to how to solve a 2x2 Rubik’s cube has a Try it in the simulator button for each one.