A standard deck of US playing cards has 54 cards including Jokers, and the standard Rubik's Cube has 54 stickers. Therefore it 's possible to represent the state of Rubik's Cube with a deck of playing cards--and it's possible to "solve" Rubik's Cube with them.

🚀 jsreed5

Apr 27 · 13 days ago · 👍 wasolili

4 Comments ↓

🍀 gritty · Apr 27 at 21:54:

interesting! Is there a program?

I also like the comparisons of how big 54 factorial is. As in, there may have never been two shuffled decks the same in the history of playing cards.

💎 istvan · Apr 28 at 11:14:

I suppose this means you can also represent the state of a cube with a base64 encoded string of 54 characters length.

🐦 wasolili [...] · Apr 29 at 00:29:

Rubik's cubes' stickers can't be placed in completely arbitrary positions. They're limited by the type of piece they're on (corner, edge, center) and there are some positions which are impossible (a single flipped piece, for example).

When all that's accounted for, there are only 43 quintillion possible states for a rubik's cube, so you could get away with only 21 cards

🚀 jsreed5 [OP] · Apr 29 at 18:02:

It would be interesting to analyze various mappings of Rubik's Cube positions to orderings of a "deck" of 21 cards. For example, what mapping leads to the fewest average twists on the cube to go to a corresponding arrangement of the deck where N cards change places? What class of deck arrangements are unreachable?