Rubik's Cube Group - Group Axioms and Properties

Group Axioms and Properties

The Rubik's Cube group (G, •) consists of the set of cube moves, G, and the operation of concatenation, •. Concatenation is a form of function composition.

The group axioms are:

  1. associativity, function composition is always associative.
  2. closure, the concatenation of two moves is another move.
  3. identity element, the empty move concatenated in either order with any other move is the same as .
  4. inverse element, reversing a move returns the cube to its previous position. Reversing a sequence of moves inverts the sequence.

More specifically, (G, •) is a permutation group. The basic cube moves form a generating set.

The cardinality of G is finite but large. Still, each position can be solved in 20 or fewer moves.

The largest order of an element in G is 1260. For example, .

(G, •) is non-abelian. Since is not the same as, not all cube moves are commutative.

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