Lars Vandenbergh's CubeZone
Speedcubing taken one step further
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Lars Vandenbergh's CubeZoneSpeedcubing taken one step further
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I'm currently working on another optimal move count study, this time for the extended cross (cross + 1 F2L pair combined). The results for solving the extended cross on a fixed cross color combined with either a fixed pair or any pair of choice (i.e. 1 of 4 possibile pairs) are already complete for face turn metric and can be found on the XCross study page.
This analysis posed a few new challenges since it involves checking over 700 times the amount of cube states compared to the color neutral cross study. The latter study I first did in 2008 and took weeks to calculate with the help of several people from the cubing community who borrowed their CPU time.
I'm still experimenting with various approaches using NodeJS workers, multithreaded C++ and CUDA. I think the CUDA implementation has the most potential as it was able to calculate the average in just over a day and the full histogram in 10 days.
I was quite new to GPU accelerated computing when I started this project and I hope I can improve on the current framework I have to be able to do more move count studies, maybe even ones that require even more cube states to explore than the 690+ trillion states I had to check for the extended cross on a fixed cross color.
(3rd July 2026)
Many people have asked me over the years what the scrambles are for the 8 move crosses based on my cross study. Unfortunately, the way the computer study was done back in 2008 didn't allow recuperating the cube states for the worst possible crosses afterwards.
The last few weeks I've been working on a full reimplementation of the code that generated these results and I'm happy to say that the all the results are consistent and I get the exact same stats.
Now that I have something that runs the whole analysis on a modern machine and finishes in 2-3 days, I was finally customize it to also generate the scrambles for the worst cases. The cross study page has been updated accordingly and now links to the scrambles for each cross solving method (fixed, opposite and color neutral).
Here are the direct links to the scrambles as well:
(26th May 2026)
The PHP scripts for ImageCube and ImageRevenge have been fixed for modern PHP versions and are now hosted on cubezone.be again.
(2nd January 2026)
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Last update on 3rd July 2026 |