I'm loving this bottom reply button!
I haven't played with a Rubik's cube in 25 years. But I used to be able to solve it in a couple of minutes. Vipros is right. There's a technique and a logical sequence of moves to doing it, but still no one has calculated definitively the minimum number of moves required to be able to guarantee to solve it.

It's still beyond the capabilities of our most powerful computers to solve this mathematically in a realistic timescale, believe it or not. I think they know that it's between 17 and 23, and that the best guess is 17, but it's yet to be proven.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 16 Sep 2008, 8:37, Reply)