Cube Coach

What the buttons do

• Scramble mixes the cube with a fresh 25-move scramble — or type your own in standard notation and press Apply.
• Solve finds a short solution (usually 18–22 moves) with a real two-phase solver, computed from the cube's current state — never by replaying your scramble backwards. Play it back at any speed, pause, or step through move by move.
• Teach me solves the same cube the way a person does — the beginner layer-by-layer method in seven stages, each one explained as it plays. More moves, but every one of them makes sense.
• Scan my cube turns your real, physical cube into the one on screen from six photos. No typing colours in one by one.
• Drag any row of stickers to turn that layer yourself; drag the background to orbit. Keyboard works too: U D L R F B, hold Shift for counter-clockwise.

Cube notation, in one minute

Every move is one letter — the face it turns: Up, Down, Left, Right, Front, Back. A letter alone means a quarter turn clockwise as if you were looking at that face. An apostrophe (R′, say "R prime") means counter-clockwise, and a 2 (like F2) means half a turn. That's the whole language.

How the scan works — no AI, just colour maths

Six photos, one per face, each lined up in the on-screen grid. Cube Coach reads the middle of every sticker (a median, so glare spots don't fool it), converts all 54 samples into a perceptual colour space, and clusters them into exactly six groups of nine — anchored by the six centre stickers, which can never lie about their face. Because every judgement is relative to your own photos, warm lamps, cool daylight and dim rooms all cancel out. Anything it's unsure about gets highlighted for a one-tap fix, and a built-in legality check catches impossible cubes (a twisted corner, a flipped edge) before solving ever starts.

Two solvers, honestly different

Solve runs Kociemba's celebrated two-phase algorithm right in your browser (as a background worker — the little pause on page load is it building its lookup tables). It finds solutions of about 18–22 moves from any of the cube's 43 quintillion states. Teach me is our own implementation of the beginner's layer-by-layer method — the same one taught in every good tutorial: bottom cross, bottom corners, middle edges, top cross, then place and twist the last pieces. It averages around 160 moves, and that's the point: each stage uses one or two short triggers you can actually memorise, and the explanations tell you why they work. Solve impresses; Teach me is how you learn to do it with the cube in your hands.