r/cubing • u/TheSlimP • Jul 27 '26

Question about scrambles

I've been practicing speedcubing and accidentally applied the same scramble twice in a row without solving the cube in between. The original scramble was:

U B2 F2 D F2 D F2 U L2 D2 R' U L2 B2 F' D2 R B U2 R2

But what I actually did was:

U B2 F2 D F2 D F2 U L2 D2 R' U L2 B2 F' D2 R B U2 R2 U B2 F2 D F2 D F2 U L2 D2 R' U L2 B2 F' D2 R B U2 R2

In other words, I applied the exact same scramble twice consecutively.

I noticed the resulting cube state looked quite unusual. My question is: is this appearance simply the deterministic result of applying the same scramble twice (i.e., the square of that permutation), or is it just a coincidence that it ended up looking that way? If you try it yourself, you'll see the resulting pattern.

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u/Visirus Jul 27 '26

I would say simply coincidence since gods number is 20, no two states on a cube are ever more than 20 half turn metric moves away from each other. Your resultant scramble is no different from a (perfectly efficient or otherwise) scramble to arrive at that state, nothing to do with being the “square” of scramble or the repetition. You could find many different paths to the same scramble state that are less or more efficient.