For impatient minds
SkimmIQ Lab is the community extension of the SkimmIQ app.
It is designed to work with the app, not replace it. The Lab adds browser tools for examining, importing and exporting puzzle states and move sequences, so players can reproduce games, compare ideas and work toward better solutions together.
SkimmIQ Lab
One puzzle.
One open problem.
Your move.
The Lab is the open workshop around SkimmIQ: an emerging human method to test and improve, a shared Notation, and browser tools for sharing puzzle states and replays.
01The human method
The Bear Method exists. Now test it, teach it, and improve it.
Across four days, Expensive-Bear-1376 reduced the human record from 240 to 107 moves and documented the approach behind it. The AI routes average about 60. That remaining gap - in moves, independent testing, and teachability - is now the challenge.
3x3x3 Classic states
1.01097 × 1038
Exact reachable state count - proven, not estimated.
Legal moves
9 tapes · 18 directions
Each swipe slides a 12-sticker tape by one position.
Human method
The Bear Method
The first documented human approach, ready for community testing.
The proof has a practical consequence across every SkimmIQ layout and color mode: if an arrangement uses exactly the required number of stickers of each color, it is reachable from solved and therefore solvable. A pattern can look completely arbitrary without being impossible.
SkimmIQ's solvers find a legal route back to solved almost instantly. The Bear Method is the first documented human solving approach: two intuitive layers followed by short commutators, setup moves, and controlled handling of the final surrounding band. What remains open is independent reproduction and clear teaching - turning one player's working method into a system the community can test, explain, and improve.
02The language
SQN - how we write states and moves.
Every discussion needs a shared language. SQN uses two alphabets: face letters record a state (look for the equals sign, as in R=MMMGGGRRR), and move tokens name a tape and slide it - R1-3 reads aloud as "row one, minus three".
The notation is an open proposal (v0.9 · RFC). Community feedback will shape v1 - including the open question of the family letters themselves.
04The story
A crooked sticker, forty years later.
SkimmIQ started in 1981 with a classmate's peeled-off stickers and a teenage thought: what if the stickers could move by themselves? Four decades later, AI made the build possible - and the idea finally shipped.
05Hands on
Feel the mechanic before you read another word.
SkimmIQ looks like a cube, but faces don't turn here. You slide closed tapes of stickers that wrap around four faces at once - one move can reshape the whole pattern. The browser demo gives you 60 seconds with the real thing: enough to understand why familiar cube instincts stop working.
No install, no sign-up. When the timer runs out, the app picks up where the demo stops.
06Join in
The discussion lives where puzzle people live.
We're opening threads in the cubing and puzzle-game communities - links will appear here as they go live. Until then: if you have a recurring pattern, a sequence with a predictable effect, a counterexample, or a method idea, write directly. Every message gets a reply.