• Welcome to the Speedsolving.com, home of the web's largest puzzle community!
    You are currently viewing our forum as a guest which gives you limited access to join discussions and access our other features.

    Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community of 40,000+ people from around the world today!

    If you are already a member, simply login to hide this message and begin participating in the community!

"New" 4x4 edge-pairing method.

Zbox95

Member
Joined
Apr 4, 2011
Messages
78
Hi, I've come up with an intermediate edge-pairing method for the 4x4 cube, in short terms, it is 2-2-2-2-1-3 pairing.
So what you do is that you pair 2 edges at the time and "store" them in the U and D or R and L faces. Pretty simple and easy to do if you can solve bigger cubes with E- or M-slice edge-pairing.

But for the last 4 edges you first do 1 edge using a "flip" method (my own, I guess). You look for 2 wing edges that belong together, for example green-red and green-red. You want both of these to be in the 2nd layer from the bottom or d layer. If they are in the u layer just do a z2 rotation or F2 move, your choice. If they are in different layers, just look for a new pair. If you can't find one with both pieces in the same layer, just do an R2 move. Then you do a u/u'/u2 move to rotate the top layers towards one of the wing-edges. The you flip one of the edges with the wanted wing-edge in it using the following algorithm:

R U R' U' F' U F

To complete this pair you align the centers agian using u/u'/u2 move.
Then you just do a 3-pair for the last 3 edges!

The funny thing with this method is that I have never executed it. I have just used my brain and come up with it.

Have fun trying it out!
 

cyoubx

Member
Joined
Aug 13, 2010
Messages
666
YouTube
Visit Channel
How would you 3-pair the last 3, there is nowhere to put them...

Well, you can also just have one unpaired edge on the U face and the other two on the E slice. You do u to match up one of the pairs on the E slice, replace that with the one on the U face then slice back to solve the other two pairs.
 

Dene

Premium Member
Joined
Dec 5, 2007
Messages
6,900
WCA
2009BEAR01
YouTube
Visit Channel
Unless I am mistaken there are only 2 distinct cases. Either two 2-cycles, or one 4-cycle. The two 2-cycles can essentially be solved in one algorithm depending on the orientation of the edges (Rw B L B' Rw2 U' R' U Rw). For the 4-cycle you can either solve one edge first and then do a 3-cycle, or you can solve the first two in the same way as you solve the earlier edges if you do two-at-a-time pairing, and then the second two with the standard algorithm (or whatever you prefer).
 
Top