How to Scramble a Cube

Twisting a cube randomly in your hands doesn’t mix it as well as you might think. A written scramble is fair, repeatable and gives a properly mixed cube every time.

How to do a scramble

1. Start with a solved cube.
2. Hold it with white on top and green facing you. This is the standard way, used in competitions.
3. Do each move in order, without turning the whole cube. R is right face clockwise, R' anticlockwise, R2 half a turn. See notation.
4. Check the picture. The map above shows how your cube should look afterwards: top in the middle of the top row, then left, front, right and back, with the bottom underneath.

Why 25 moves?

After about 20 random turns a cube is about as mixed as it can get, and 25 adds a safety margin. Our generator never turns the same face twice in a row and avoids patterns like R L R that waste moves, just like competition-style random-move scrambles.

Random-move and random-state scrambles

Official competitions go one step further. Their software picks a completely random position out of all 43 quintillion, then uses a solver to work out moves that reach it. This is called a random-state scramble. It guarantees every position is equally likely. A 25-move random-move scramble, like ours, is very close to that and is perfect for practice and the cube timer.

Scrambling without a list

If you have nothing to read from, do at least 30 turns, mixing all six faces, and include the back and bottom (people often forget them). Don’t repeat short patterns, or you might just undo your own moves.

Questions people ask

How many moves should a scramble be?

About 20 to 25 random face turns. Competition-style random-move scrambles for the 3x3 are usually 25 moves.

Which way do I hold the cube to scramble?

White on top, green in front. That is the standard orientation.