Skewb
The Skewb - crazy deep slice puzzle!
Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skewb
Jaap's page: http://www.jaapsch.net/puzzles/skewb.htm
Here's a nice easy solution by (and I quote) "monkeydude1313" (:)) that has a few simple algorithms and only makes turns of two... erm, not "faces" as such but the "L" and "R" notation used represents... well, perhaps I should let monkeydude1313 explain!
Description and notation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGiv6QSJFL4
Soooo, the "L" and "R" moves are performed as clockwise rotations of the entire half-cube around the Upper-Left-Front and Upper-Right-Front corners. In the early days I made the mistake of not distinguishing between the Upper Front and Lower Front corners!
Bottom Corners and Centers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJNH_A9cnqw
To summarise: The bottom "layer" is mostly solved intuitively with the first three corners going into place almost trivially: -
- the first bottom corner is any corner that goes in easy
- the second corner is adjacent to the first -- I like to go for the next corner to the right. This one may go in correctly twisted. If not, it can be moved out into the upper "layer" to be rotated prior to being placed back in.
- the third corner can be placed as the second as we still have a spare free corner that can be used to twist our candidate corner without messing up corners one and two.
- the forth corner will require some jiggery-pokery if it doesn't go in correctly twisted: hold skewb with twisted corner in Bottom-Right-Front and perform R L R' L' to twist the corner clockwise. It may be necessary to perform this twice.
Now the centres can be permuted: Up and Front will be swapped, as will Right and Left, whereas Down and Back will remain unchanged.
The algorithm: R' L R L' (a down-down, up-up type movement reminiscent of a pyraminx move)
Finishing off with the top corners: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcvOKte4K9A
Right, so the final corners get twisted and switched with that same algorithm from the face-swapping: R' L R L' performed twice. If you have corners like the headlights-sidelights OLL with headlights facing left and sidelights on the right side facing B and F it will solve the "last layer". If there are a pair of solved corners diagonally opposite each other and a pair of unsolved corners also diagonally opposite each other then performing the algorithm R'LRL' twice with result in the headlights sidelights and repeat to solve!