Sandra Workman
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Sunshine Workman (username ABCubeTutor) is the proposer of the ABCube Method.
History
Sunshine Workman, formerly Sandra Workman describes her cubing journey this way:
"I was a teenager in middle school when the Rubik's Cube craze first struck. Like a lot of people, I bought a paperback book (The Simple Solution to Rubik's Cube, by James Nourse) and began memorizing.
I wasn't fast. No one was back then; the cubes were clunky, and didn't turn well. Ah, but how wonderful it was when the colors lined up!
If you hadn't bought the book, the standard method at the time was to either peel the stickers off and reapply, or take the cube apart and reassemble. If I walked down the street with a solved cube, people would stop me to ask me which of the two methods I'd done, and when I claimed I had done neither, but has solved it by twisting, they would unilaterally take my cube, scramble it, and demand that I demonstrate. I would.
Being able to solve the cube was the key to my survival of middle school and high school. My friends nagged me to teach them, and soon I was surrounded by a cloud of people at every lunch and recess. As my friends showed off to their friends, their friends began asking me to teach them also, and then their friend's friends. Before long, the bullies, by unspoken edict, stopped bullying me, so they could ask me to teach them, too.
Fast forward through decades, while the Rubik's Revenge (a 4x4x4 cube) and then the Professor's Cube (the 5x5x5 cube) came out and became popular, and more complex cubes as well. I couldn't find a satisfactory method to learn these new challenges. I became overwhelmed.
One day, after again researching the way to solve the last piece, I wrote the algorithm down on a piece of paper, and transcribed it into directional arrows instead of letters. It was a simple and elegant algorithm, and with the arrows it was easy to see how it was a mathematical zero, so it wouldn't displace any cubes except the ones it intended to. From there I extrapolated: what happens when I apply the same movements to different slices?
I tried it on smaller cubes with the left and right columns, and lo and behold, it swapped three of my corners around. When I used one outer column and one inner column, it manipulated the Edges. I figured out that if I used this formula, I could throw away almost all the different algorithms I'd memorized and previously used. It was quicker to just do this new move once, twice if needed, than to pause to figure out which of the other algorithms to use. Everything else the Cube needed could all be done with another formula, with half as many moves.
Armed with a four-twist formula (which doesn't scramble if done in sets of six) and the eight-twist formula, I created this method, and wrote an unpublished book that would solve cubes of every complexity, with one exception: I still had the parity to work with - that one ridiculously long algorithm with its singular purpose. So I got my paper and pencil out again, and wrote out the algorithm on paper, and treated it like an algebraic equation; whenever there was a turn in the beginning and its opposite in the end, i would strike them both out. The whole long thing reduced down to: a single slice, turning one quarter-turn in the middle of the whole thing.
At the same time, I was practicing solving my Void Cube (a 3x3x3 cube with invisible centers). I attempted a solve, and came up with the same parity, and realized it was for the same reason. The parity existed because the invisible center was a quarter-turn off. That's when I put the two together, and realized that parities don't need to be solved, when they can so simply just be undone.
A parity is when it looks like there are two pieces at the end of a solve that are not where they belong, and they can't be solved by the standard moves, because the standard moves (that is to say, my formulas, or the final algorithms of other solutions) always only move three pieces, they don't displace any other pieces. But the thing is, there actually never are two pieces out of place. there are always three pieces out of place. The reason it seems like there are two out of place, is because the invisible center is off by a quarter turn. If you make that quarter turn, it returns the cube to a traditionally solvable state.
This Method works on every standard nxnxn cube, utilizing only the two simple formulas, known as Formula A (four turns, moving a chosen piece out of the way, moving the chosen space down, moving the chosen cube into the space, and then moving the piece now in the space back up: OUT, DOWN, IN, UP) and Formula B (the eight-turn multi-use mentioned above).
It is also easily adapted to solve non-standard cubes, such as the WitEden 3x3x9 Cube.
I hope you enjoy."
See also
External Links
- Sandra Workman's website about the ABCube method
- Sandra Workman's YouTube channel
- Sandra Workman's Twitch channel
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