Rubik's Cube Encoding

Colors

There are 6 colors in the cube. They will be encoded as follows:

• 0 represent the color red
• 1 represent the color blue
• 2 represent the color green
• 3 represent the color yellow
• 4 represent the color orange
• 5 represent the color white

Faces

A Rubik's Cube has 6 sides. Imagine you are looking directly at one of the faces ('Front'). There are 2 faces on the left and right ('Left', 'Right'), 2 faces directly above and below ('Up', 'Down'), and 1 face behind ('Back')

Each face of the Cube will be represented as a 3x3 array:

• 0 or 'F' represents the 'front' face or the face you are looking at

• 2 or 'L' represents the 'left' face

• 3 or 'R' represents the 'right' face

• 4 or 'U' represents the 'up' face

• 5 or 'D' represents the 'down' face

The whole cube can be represented as a 6x3x3 array:

cube = [front, left, right, up, down, back]

Moves:

Rotating Faces

Each face of the cube can be rotated in one of three ways:

• -1 represents rotating the face clockwise
• 1 represents rotating the face anti-clockwise
• 2 represents rotating the face 180 degrees (or 2 clockwise/anti-clockwise rotations in a row)

With 6 total faces, with 3 moves per face, there are a total of 18 moves. 'F0' would be rotating the front face clockwise. 'L1' would be to rotate the left face anti-clockwise as if you are facing the left face.

Every rotation would change the colors on all the other faces except the face directly opposite to the face being rotated. Rotating the front face would not effect the back face, the right face would not change the left face and rotating the up face woould not change the down face.