What's up cubers? My name is Kenneth. Today I'm going to talk about the Molecube from Recent Toys
Which is the distributor for Mefferts so it's a Mefferts puzzle. Let's open it up.
I almost forgot, I've been playing with this puzzle for a while, I'm only unboxing it to show you guys what the box
looked like.
So here's the Molecube. It's also known as the Sudoku Ball Cube and it's also known as the Nine-Colored Cube
so it's got a lot of names, and by those names you can kind of, probably figure out what the point of the
puzzle is but basically you have nine colors and the point is instead of a Rubik's cube where you
want to get each side to have the same colour, this one you want each side to have all different colours.
And so here you can see, each color is completely different.
If I two reds on this side it wouldn't be solved.
And so you can see this is one of the solved states.
It's a pretty challenging puzzle and it's not challenging because it's hard to move
the pieces around, right, it's just a Rubik's cube. The hard part is to try to figure out where the pieces should go
so that it can have nine different colors on each side.
So anyway, let's talk a little bit about the movement of the puzzle.
First off you can tell right away, it's got a clicking mechanism
It's a little bit loud for me, it's very clickety
And so that's something that I'm not quite a fan of. But when I hand it to people and have them play with it
they like the clickiness.
It's got a, kind of a nice feeling to it. This clickiness, it's very similar to a skewb.
Anyway, the clickiness is okay. Besides that the turning is very good. It turns really well for like a
non-speedcube type of puzzle which is kind of nice, so that is very satisfying to play with. The pieces do
pop, so you do have to be a little bit careful with that.
But they don't pop that often.
And when they do it it's pretty easy to correct
So anyway, let me scramble it up for you now and we can talk a little more about it. I actually looked up the
puzzle on, Jaap's puzzles page, he's the guy that has all the information, all the math behind each of these
puzzles and there's some cool things about this puzzle. One is it doesn't have very many positions
compared to a Rubik's cube it only has 268 billion positions,
Compared to a Rubik's cube with 43 quintillion, that's not that many,
And the main reason why is obviously each piece only has a single orientation.
Right, if you twisted this corner it would still just be green corner, right here, and so on a normal Rubik's cube
if you twist a corner it's a whole new position 'cause there's three stickers and they're no longer on the side
that they were on.
So that makes this puzzle have a far fewer number of positions to twist it in.
Still plenty of positions to play with
Another interesting thing about this puzzle is, I mentioned earlier one of the solved states is
actually the 80 solved states. So that's pretty cool too.
And, on Jaap's puzzle page he describes three kind of variants of solved states.
Which I think is pretty interesting.
So, the solving of the puzzle is actually really difficult and obviously the solving there's two stages
the first stage is trying to figure out where each piece belongs
and the second state is actually putting those pieces where they belong.
Obviously the difficulty is trying to figure out where each piece belongs and, there's a lot of problems
you have to overcome to figure that including many kind of interesting parities or,
kind of dead ends that you come across and so anyway it's pretty fun, I think I've got a really good
solution to it
I can solve it every time and, I know pretty quickly whether or not I'm going down a dead end.
And when I say solve it I mean try to find a new solution or find a solution without having a memorised
kind of solved state.
Obviously if you memorized the solved state, if you take a picture of it or a video of it or something like that
and just solve it directly to that picture that you took
That's very easy right.
They were a few things I wanted to talk about but if you don't like spoilers or hints please go ahead and
skip ahead.
But basically, there are three kind of families of colors and that's the first thing you have to realize
the first family of colors is the two green corners so it's the only group with, there's only two pieces.
And you can tell that there are corners and they have to be opposite each other, right because one corner
will get three sides and if there's two corners you're going to get all six sides with that color.
So there is only two green pieces and they have to be on corners.
If you want to get all the sides of the puzzle.
Besides that there are then the six center pieces and they all have a center, a corner and an edge.
And they all actually will line up in a plane which is very interesting.
So you can see this plane right here. Basically what I do when I determine where
I want the corner piece. I will, say this light blue piece goes here then I will grab the opposite corner
look at where the center is and in this plane I'll know that the blue edge has to go here.
So that's the kind of other group there is and that works for all the corners, so this orange one.
You can see I grab this top corner, find this center and then go through that corner and you'll find
where the edge belongs, where it has to go.
Then the third kind of family of colors is the, 'edge only' colors and so there are two of those, there is
like this red 'edge only' right here.
And then there is a purple one as well. So these purple ones are 'edge only's and there is two of these colors
types, I guess, and obviously you would need three edges right, so one edge can get two sides.
There are six sides so you need three edges.
If you have 'edge only' colors.
Those are the families of colors. Once you realize that then it becomes a lot easier trying to figure out where
each, kind of piece, goes.
So now that it's scrambled, I think I'm going to give it a solve. Let me continue to hand scramble it.
[Cube makes clicking noises]
Ok.
That's a good hand scramble.
And I think I'm going to give it a solve so...
On your marks, get set and go.
So now I'm checking it for those parities. So I got the corners all in a spot I think I'd like
but I want to check for parities.
Um...
Ok, the first parity check is done
and I'm checking for the second one
That, that one's done as well.
So now I can begin solving it.
[Cube makes clicking noises]
Or finish solving it I guess, I've already begun.
Alright, I'm done.
[Laughs]
There we go.
That's pretty much all I had for you guys. I hope you guys enjoyed this video.
Definitely leave a comment below.
And, hit the like button if you enjoyed it and that's it guys, thanks for watching and of course, have a great day.
[Theme music.]