All About Twisty Puzzles

Introduction The regular 3x3 has lots of different ways to be solved. With this in mind, it may sound logical that his big brother has even more ways to be approached! Therefore, I shall only discuss some unique aspects which are typical for a 4x4, compared to a 3x3. Parity, why does it happen? If you have solved a 4x4 before with the most commonly used method (the 3x3 reduction), than you've probably already encountered the concept of parity . In mathematics, parity literally means 'to be even or odd'. Applied to cubic puzzles: does it have an even number of layers or an odd number of layers? If you reduce a 4x4 to a 3x3, you're reducing an even-layered puzzle to an odd-layered puzzle. In other words, you're changing  its parity. This also explains why one doesn't have any parity issues when a 4x4 is reduced to a 2x2, since you're reducing from even to even. If you change a puzzle's parity, you're forcing it to change its 'settings...

Concept The Axis Cube (or Axel Cube) is a modification of a standard cubic 3x3. The way it's designed can be deduced from its looks and the correlation to a 3x3, but can be pretty tricky to people who see this for the first time. In short: it comes down to rotating the cube by 60°, cutting the faces and extending them to make the puzzle cubic again. With this in mind, you can easily see that this is just a shape modification of a 3x3 and is solved in exactly the same way. The concept was first introduced by Adam G. Cowan (the same person who designed the Ghost Cube in 2008). Solving Method Since this is essentially a shape mod of a standard 3x3, the way to solve it is exactly the same. Every method which is used to solve the 3x3 can be applied to the Axis Cube. But there are some difficulties. One way to approach the 3x3 is solving it layer by layer, working your way from bottom to top. This is, in my opinion, the easiest way to solve the Axis Cube as well. Speedc...