• BillyClark@piefed.social
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    13 days ago

    The mom misunderstood the puzzle when she said “You got that talent from me,” which also foreshadows her flashback.

    Very few people have ever solved a Rubik’s Cube from scratch, unless you’re including pure luck or people who didn’t really mix it up. But pure luck isn’t really a “talent”. To solve the puzzle yourself involves, at the very least, a lot of analysis and writing diagrams and sequences and shit.

    It’s the mom’s misconception that makes this comic so real to me. She probably thinks people solve them by figuring it all out themselves. But the kid knows that he followed instructions.

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      The mom yanked off the stickers and put them back in the right order. That’s how she thinks kids would solve them.

      • BillyClark@piefed.social
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        12 days ago

        Yes that is essential to what I was saying. The mom thought she would get away with rearranging the stickers as a child because she thought people would believe that she solved the puzzle. And now as an adult, she’s confused because she believes her child actually solved it, which she believes is simply extremely difficult, not virtually impossible. She would understand what actually happened if she understood that people basically can’t solve it, and that her kid simply followed the fairly simple instructions that likely came with the cube.

        This is a good reminder for me, though, to keep my audience in mind when writing comments. I have left most meme communities, but the comics community is going to be similar to meme communities with regard to members.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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      12 days ago

      Oh, so that’s why i’ve found them always freaking hard? People just remember moves depending on patterns?

      • BillyClark@piefed.social
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        12 days ago

        Yes. It is possible to luck into a solution if you don’t know a method. But it’s pretty rare, and if you don’t get lucky, the best most people will ever do is to have a mostly solved cube.

        To go further requires you to use predefined sequences of moves that at first appear to mess up the parts that were already solved, or to systematically work out those sequences yourself, which would involve some serious effort with extra cubes or with writing down sequences on paper or something similar.

        It’s counterintuitive, but at a certain point, if the cube is mostly solved, but the last bits are wrong, the only way a normal person could solve it without these sequences is to completely mix up the cube again and start over, hoping to get luckier the next time.

        I don’t know the odds of getting lucky like I’ve said. I used to practice cubing just to pass time, and I’ve probably completed hundreds of cubes, and only once did I luck into a solved cube without using those sequences. And I assume I was lucky even with that.