Anybody Can Solve a Rubik's Cube Blindfolded

Anybody can solve a Rubik’s cube blindfolded. I recorded a video of myself doing it at seventeen years old using the Classic Pochmann method. It took me ten minutes, but speedcubers like Flavian do it on Britain’s Got Talent in under thirty seconds.

In my experience, most people are impressed if you can solve a Rubik’s cube at all. The truth is, if you dedicate yourself, you can probably learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube sighted in a day. There’s not much to it. It’s just memorizing sequences of moves called algorithms and knowing when to use them.

As you might expect, blindsolving a Rubik’s cube is harder than doing it sighted, at least in my limited experience. What might surprise you though is that it’s not much harder. If you can remember twenty to thirty random letters and a few algorithms, you can blindsolve the Rubik’s cube. Remembering random letters might sound hard, but even I can do it after making up sentences to fit the letters and my short-term memory is probably less than average.

If I remember correctly, in my video, I solved it using only three algorithms. The algorithms were muscle memory, so that was easy. The hard part was memorizing the locations of all the pieces. I did that off camera and it took some time.

As someone who has solved the Rubik’s cube blindfolded, I think that non-blindsolvers are impressed with the wrong aspect of Flavian’s Britain’s Got Talent audition. Solving three cubes blindfolded isn’t that impressive. If you solve one cube blindfolded, which as I’ve already pointed out isn’t that hard, then solving three just requires memorizing (making up sentences or stories for) two more cubes.

To me, the impressive aspect of Flavian’s performance was his speed. He was incredibly fast. It took me twenty times as long, although in my video that was only the first or second time I had done it. Still, speed takes practice and his practice shows.

I usually have an important or deep message in my entries, but not this one. I just wanted to point out that this seemingly impossible feat is actually something anybody can learn to do.