Faces and moves: how to read cube notation

Every Rubik’s Cube move can be written with one letter. The six letters name the six faces:

• U for Up, the top face
• D for Down, the bottom face
• L for Left
• R for Right
• F for Front, the face towards you
• B for Back

A letter on its own means: turn that face a quarter turn clockwise, as if you were looking straight at that face from outside the cube. That wording matters. Look at the Down face from underneath and “clockwise” appears to go the opposite way round compared with how it looks from above.

Two small marks change a move:

• A prime, written ' and said “prime”, means the same quarter turn counter-clockwise. R' undoes R.
• A 2 means a half turn, 180°. F2 is the same whichever way you turn.

Moves are read left to right. R U R' U' means: turn Right, turn Up, turn Right back, turn Up back. Cubers call this the “sexy move”, and you will meet it again.

Notation only ever talks about turning faces. It never tells you to pick the whole cube up and spin it. There is one more fact you can always rely on: the six centres never change place relative to each other. Each centre is attached to the hidden core and only spins on the spot.

In the usual colour scheme white is opposite yellow, red opposite orange, and green opposite blue. Whichever colour sits on a centre is the colour that face is meant to have when the cube is solved, so when you lose track of what goes where, look at the centres.

The puzzle was invented in 1974 by Ernő Rubik, a Hungarian architect and teacher in Budapest, who made it to help students think about three-dimensional objects. It first went on sale in Hungary in 1977 as the Magic Cube, and it reached the rest of the world in 1980 as Rubik’s Cube.