Search Results

We study, for different Rubik’s puzzles, whether from any starting state one can solve the puzzle as slowly as possible, visiting every reachable state exactly once before reaching the solved configuration. This question corresponds to the existence of Hamiltonian paths (ending in the solved state) in the Cayley graphs associated with these puzzles. A major conjecture attributed to Lovász is that every Cayley graph has a Hamiltonian path. An even stronger version of the conjecture, considered by Dupuis and Wagon (2015) and Gregor et al. (2024), is that every Cayley graph of degree at least 3 is either bipartite and has Hamiltonian paths between any pair of vertices on opposite parts, or is non-bipartite and has Hamiltonian paths between any pair of vertices. Our study of slowly solving Rubik’s puzzles amounts to studying this Strong Lovász Conjecture in their respective Cayley graphs. We first verify the Strong Lovász Conjecture computationally for small Rubik’s puzzles like the 1 × 2 × 3 or 1 × 3 × 3 cuboids, which have under 200 states. This approach, however, becomes infeasible for the 2 × 2 × 2, which has over 3.6 million states. Our main result is then showing that the Strong Lovász Conjecture holds for the 2 × 2 × 2 cube, using a careful graph-theoretic construction based on the subgroup induced by the R and U turns.