Question for Steven [Off Topic]

No, I can not solve it.

But to be fair, I never really spent much time with it either.

As I kid, I spent maybe an hour on it once, became frustrated,
and took the engineering approach of removing all the stickers
and reattaching them for “solved appearance”. Feeling satisfied,
I never really looked at the thing again.

To solve a Rubik’s cube (honestly), one needs to learn a set of
helpful sequences, and then using this set as box of tools,
choose from this set as needed (given the appearance),
to result in the solved cube.

There are two ways to learn these helpful sequences.
One is to have someone who knows the sequences teach you.
The other (perhaps the more “honest”) is to discover them
on your own through trial-and-error and observation through
“playing with it”. In other words, you try things and you see
what results. For instance, you will see that a particular
sequence of turns will always reorient certain squares
in a particular way. This becomes a tool for the toolbox.
After you have enough of these, you can solve the cube.

In my case, I simply didn’t have the patience to go
through this process of self-discovery, and found
the sticker method to be far smarter. 😉

S