Wetten, dass..? vom 5. November

Using the method I describe here, I won the world championship in 2005 and got the current official world records 8.39 seconds for single solve and 9.74 seconds for mean-of-3. Watch an older video where I solved the clock in around 10 seconds (not on the stackmat, though). Any comments are welcome. Please let me know about your experiences with my page/system. Btw, I didn't really invent the system, I just optimized the well-known 14-move solution that you can for example find at Jaap's page.

My solution

Before we start, let me explain my notation. In the pictures below, you'll always see the goal state of the clocks *after* the turn. Buttons pushed up are shown (the yellow circles), buttons pushed down aren't. The wheels that you can turn are marked with a thick green stripe. If several are thick than you can turn any of them. I don't even know which ones I use there, it depends on where my fingers happen to be and the desired direction of the turn. The hours used are just examples, my drawing program allows me to draw 3, 6, 9 and 12 easily.

Equalize the cross. The first goal is not to bring each clock to 12, but to make them all show the same hour. The middle clock is our reference. Connect the four adjacent clocks to it, first the upper, then the left, then the bottom then the right one. The picture always shows the relevant clocks after the turn.


Turn the cross clocks to 12. You can use either of the upper wheels.


Flip the clock. Flip the whole toy, we'll now solve the back side. Turn it around the y-axis, so that afterwards you hold it correctly oriented (12 is on top). You don't expect a picture for this, do you?

Equalize the cross. Yes, this is indeed the exact same thing you did with the first side. Notice that you don't even have to change the buttons at all for the first turn (I optimized it to be this way).


Equalize cross with corners. Similar to the previous step. Remember to not turn the corner clock itself, but instead the other clocks!


Turn all clocks to 12.



Stefan Pochmann
Last modified: March 20 2007, 21:33:34