[Math] Minimum number of random moves needed to uniformly scramble a Rubik’s cube

rubiks-cube

Follow up from my last question: $3 \times 3$ Rubik's cube scrambling question

I am talking about $3 \times 3$ Rubik's cubes. Start with a solved cube. Then make some amount of random moves (where moves are defined using the half-turn metric: any twist of the face, i.e. 90 degrees counterclockwise, 90 degrees clockwise, 180 degrees are each one move). After how many moves will each of the 43 quintillion states be equally likely? If the answer is "infinitely many," can someone give some idea of how many moves will be "close enough?"

Best Answer

I was able to find several resources on the Rubik's cube group - much more than the last time I checked :-)

One can study the group of symmetries of the Rubik's cube and the Cayley Graph generated by the rotations U,D,L,R,F,B which correspond to the twist of the up down left right front back faces.

Your question is about how long it takes to scramble a Rubik's cube... in math jargon it is the mixing time of a random walk on a Cayley graph of the Rubik's cube group. I don't know the specific case of the Rubik's cube group, but Diaconis and Bayer showed it takes about 7 shuffles to get a uniform distribution on a deck of cards, that is about $52! = 8 \times 10^{67}$ possibilties.

In the case of random walk generated by twists of the Rubik's Cube is a special case of the theory of mixing times of random walks on groups:

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