How to Beat the DEATH MAZE in "CUBE" (1997)

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If you woke up in a maze of trapped cubes, what would you do? In this How to Beat video, we’ll follow the cube captives, see if we can make better decisions, and ultimately attempt to beat the DEATH MAZE in, Cube. If you think you have a better way, let me know in the comments! If you like these how to beat videos, consider subscribing. Before we start, let me be clear. I’m not good with math, and I am positive I'm wrong about a lot of things I talk about. Please correct me in the comments. I know you will. We start out following a man named Alderson, who woke up in a sci-fi looking cube. Imagine just going about your day, then waking up in here. You just know you’re not gonna have a good time. This ain’t an ordinary room, and nothing about it seems hospitable in the slightest. The first red flag is that he’s wearing a prisoner’s uniform, but there’s no toilet, bed, food, or water, so this is arguably worse than a prison. Even Goreng from The Platform got these amenities. The good news is that it’s not a straight up execution, or he’d already be dead. I guess it could still be an execution, and the Cube people just wanna have a little fun with him first. However, it’s most likely an experiment or a gauntlet, in which case the only reasonable thing to do is assume you can win your freedom and become the Cube Warrior’s version of a Rudiarius. Alderson pops some doors open to see what’s what. When he opens the door to the blue room, there is a weird sound. But when he opens the red room, there isn’t a sound. And when he opens the orange room, the same weird sound from the blue room plays. What that means, I don’t know. Unfortunately this looks like a trial and error puzzle, and I don’t think you get a second chance. Well, that’s the end of this guy's story. Brah didn’t even know what hit him. You might feel sorry for this guy, but I think he got off easy. This was a fairly rudimentary trap for such a sophisticated environment, which makes me lean towards this being a game or gauntlet. They have to have cameras somewhere streaming to a Pay Per View audience. Why would you waste perfectly good entertainment? Unpopular opinion, they should bring back gladiatorial type games, upgraded with modern technology and engineering. Supermarket Sweep just isn’t cutting it. Somewhere else in the cube we have two other survivors, Quentin and Worth. Each person seems to wake up from a drugged state in a different room. The door next to them opens up and Quentin judo throws the woman to the ground. This nice lady’s name is Holloway. In the background there’s a loud noise, like something large and mechanical is moving outside the room. Another girl, Leaven, joins them, as well as a man named Rennes. The more the merrier considering someone has to test out each room for traps. Now would be a good time for everyone to compare notes. Quentin and Rennes already had experience with traps before meeting up. It’s likely they both have encountered different types of traps, as well as the presence of other non-trapped rooms. It should be apparent that they’re in a maze of cubes that doubles as a minefield, and there should be a safe path around the traps and out of the maze. I initially thought they might be playing some sort of 3 dimensional minesweeper, but there’s nothing that indicates the number of trap rooms they might be surrounded by. These are the two problems they need to find solutions for now. 1. A trap detection method. 2. Where an exit would be. It’s best to solve the first problem before moving on to the second. Until you can safely navigate the cube, finding an exit path is somewhat moot. Detecting what rooms are trapped is difficult because the traps are invisible until activated by a human presence. There’s two ways this can go down. Either we are able to reliably, physically detect and/or cross traps, which is unlikely, or more likely there has to be a trap detection method we haven’t discovered yet. If there isn’t a way to reliably, physically detect traps, it invalidates the player’s decisions, which invalidates the cube’s purpose as a game. We already concluded that it’s most likely a game, so in this case it means there has to be another way to detect traps. I’d gather as much information that they can observe, which would amount to: 1. Does anyone have any useful skills or knowledge 2. Is noise or no noise when opening cube doors correlated with traps 3. Is the color of the room correlated with traps 4. Are the room number plates in each cube correlated with traps 5. The background noise appearing at random intervals 6. Or anything else that’s not identical room to room. Besides these variables, everything else is identical and can’t be used. Then I'd start manually testing all surrounding rooms for traps and assessing for any correlations of the above variables. Like Rennes discovered, you can use your boot to trigger a lot of traps. Enough to find correlations. But let me be clear, do not use physical trap detection as a final determinate for a cube’s safety. Our cube captives also decide to manually detect trap rooms, and with some initial success they wrongly conclude that physically detecting traps is 100% reliable. While booting a room is fairly effective in detecting many traps, it’s almost certainly catastrophically wrong. You only have to be wrong once, just ask Alderson. The problem which they already know is that there are a variety of traps that have a variety of activation triggers. A trap could detect a human based on motion, sound, and pressure. All things a boot could trigger. But traps could also be triggered based on thermals, chemicals, tripwires, and a host of other things like thresholds, time-activation, location-specificity, and any combinations of these. For example, a trap could be a spike that gets instantly thrust up through your body, but is only activated if you step on a certain tile of the room, with 150lbs of pressure, for a minimum of 10 second, and only when a heat signature is present. It would be impossible to test this trap unless you physically walked into the trapped cube, and by the time you knew a trap existed you were dead. If you have to move into another cube to further test your trap detection method, in addition to booting, I'd also try to test for thermals and chemicals by giving the unknown cube a nice slap from within the corridor. If that works, have 1 person cross the entire cube at a time while being ready to Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge. Our protagonists choose the logical, yet seemingly too obvious strategy of going in a straight line while detouring around trap rooms. That same mechanical background noise starts again, and Rennes remarks that it’s occurring in regular intervals. A piece to the puzzle, no doubt. Maybe we are in a giant shuffling Rubik's cube and the goal is to solve it, but there isn’t a mechanism for shifting cubes, and the shifting is happening at random intervals completely outside of their control. So that's a no Rubik’s cube theory. Leaven and the crew just now discover that there are serial numbers pointing to each room. How the hell did they miss this. The rooms are practically identical except for like 2 things. The first number she reads is 566.472.737, which is the room they are going into. The second number she reads is 476.804.539, which is the room they came from. It’s not. If these were room numbers, based on 566,472,737 rooms, and at a diameter of 14 feet per room plus 1 feet of hatchways on either side, you’re looking at a diameter of 2.5 miles and nearly 16 cubic miles of cubes. The diameter of this monstrosity would be like 12 aircraft carriers lined up end to end. I highly, highly doubt an organization built 1800 aircraft carriers worth of cubes for 7 people to wander around. While we don’t know how big the cube is, it has to be way smaller than they think. Even if they were room numbers, they don’t seem to be sequential, so unless they are encoded somehow they are no use for finding an exit. And even if they were sequential, we still don’t know where an exit might be. So far, these numbers aren’t helping as a trap detection method or for finding a way out. Which is concerning and odd. From the six potential variables we’ve observed none seem to be correlated with solutions. The numbers stand out because they could be some type of code. They must be missing something. The numbers have to mean something. It’s possible they need more information before they can figure out solutions. Heading towards a side and traveling along it while looking for exits would potentially give them the dimensions of the main cube. I’d also leave pieces of ripped clothing as line markers to indicate if they have already been in that cube, and that it’s not trapped in case they need to backtrack. Like we saw in my As above so below video, these little guys can be the difference between life and death. This is a pretty interesting quirk. There’s probably some benefit to relieving a parched mouth in the face of dehydration, but I doubt they need that right now as it’s only been a few hours. Rennes boots the next room and it looks clear of traps, but he holds the group up anyways. He says that the air is dry in there, and that there may be a molecular sensor based trap that detects hydrogen sulfide excreted from skin. I don’t know enough about biology to confirm or deny this, but the internet does indicate that humans do produce and excrete this chemical in some manner. It’s probably a good idea to avoid rooms that present abnormalities and don’t conform to the patterns associated with non-trapped rooms. Rennes reveals that he is a 7-time escapee of French prisons. It might seem like a good idea to follow a prison escape artist's lead, but this isn’t a prison. If it was a prison, there wouldn’t be doors and there would be traps on every side. They are in a 3D maze that must have a path out, they just need to cautiously unravel the game's rules. Great advice Houdini, I think we will stop to think things through if that’s chill with you. You got something on your face by the way. It’s now clear that physically testing traps isn’t reliable, so trap detection must be based on one of the aforementioned variables, likely the numbering system. Rennes should have slapped the interior of the cube first before hopping in, it’s pretty dumb for someone who supposedly knows a lot about sensors to not account for thermal sensors. His dodge game wasn’t on point either, instead of diving out of the way he just stood there and said merde. The crew finally does what they should have done a long ass time ago. Share information. We know Quentin is a cop, Rennes ‘was’ an escape artist, we don’t know anything about Alderson other than he was one unlucky SOB, but what about the others. Okay, that’s not helpful at all. We need specific details. That’s better, but still too vague. Can everyone stop being intentionally opaque, good god. Nobody cares about your Edgar Allan Poe bullshit, just give a straight answer. We are on the clock in a life and death situation here. Quentin uses his X-Ray detective skills.. .. of the survivors to discover that Leaven is a math student. It really shouldn’t have been that hard to figure out, but everyone felt like wasting time being ambiguous for no reason. Leaven uses her special math powers to assess the mysterious room numbers and determines that the trapped rooms they had encountered all had 3 sequences of 3 digit prime numbers. For everyone that ignored everything taught in math class like me, prime numbers are numbers that have only 2 factors: 1 and themselves. None of these number sequences are prime, so the room is theoretically safe. Right, but like Quentin is trying to say, that’s only 3 data points which is a low enough sample size to be coincidence. If half the rooms were traps, they can only really be 87.5% confident in this method. Sounds like a lot, but it’s really not. This whole time I've been speculating that the numbers mean something, and I think what she’s onto is worth testing, but you will only know if the theory holds up with a high degree of confidence once you’ve tested at least 10 rooms. Even then, the cost of physically checking a room too is low, so you might as well sniff, slap, and boot every room anyways. The montage of them navigating rooms seems pretty convincing that prime numbers are the key to detecting traps. So they seemed to have solved the trap detection problem, but they still haven’t solved the exit path problem. Since there really isn’t anything else that they can use to determine an exit path, and the numbers were a form of key to half their problem, it’s likely the numbers are also a key to the other half of their problem. It’s a good thing Rennes got faceshotted instead of Leaven because there is no way they would have figured that out by themselves. On that note, they need to keep Leaven alive at all costs because she’s probably their only chance of figuring out a way out of here. They should continue heading towards a side of the cube so they can map out the potential dimensions of the main cube. Eventually they hit a dead end with traps on all sides and are forced to backtrack. By now they’re probably getting claustrophobic, dehydrated, and a bit delirious. This is where line markers would be nice to have, it would lower the mental burden of doing math and double checking each room you may have already been in. Their detour around the dead end is put on pause when they hear some noises coming from the cube above them. Quentin pops the door and another person falls through. His name is Kazan and he appears to have some type of mental disorder. On a side note it’s interesting how all of the captives are named and characterized after famous prisons around the world. Kazan has a mental condition of sorts, which relates to the Kazan Prison Mental Hospital in Russia. Quentin is a male and San Quentin is a prison for males. Holloway is a female and Holloway Prison is female-only. Rennes, Rennes Prison. Leaven and Worth, Leavenworth. Also interesting that these two share a prison name. I don’t think any of this helps them though. The captives continue their straight line path to the side of the cube while checking for prime number based trap rooms. But this time, there’s a problem. This is exactly why I kept saying to tread carefully. To think that prime numbers solved everything was foolish, even with it being a pretty successful strategy. Luckily for Quentin, this trap gave him time to dive out of the way. The prime number trap detection theory is far from worthless, because there is obviously a significant correlation. It’s likely that there is just some caveat or additional piece to it. Under investigation from Quentin, Worth reveals that he’s an engineer that was contracted to build the shell of this cube, or sarcophagus as he pessimistically puts it. He claims he knows nothing of the interior except that the shell does not sit flush against the cube of cubes. Worth, you piece of shit. I knew that woe is me garbage was a projection of guilt or a diversion from his actual profession and affiliations. When questioned about who was in charge, why the cube was built, and what it’s purpose is, he goes on a nihilistic tirade that it was just built because we could, and that nobody was in charge and it was just a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. Uh, okay. You just admitted that you were a victim of compartmentalization and now you’re claiming to know all about the cube. I’m not buying it. There’s no point in being hopeless anyways. Now knowing Worth has knowledge of the exterior, Leaven jumps in and questions him further. Worth reveals that the cube is 434 feet squared, and that there most likely is 1 cube worth of space between the shell and the main cube, and that there is a door on one side of the shell, but he doesn’t know which side it’s on. Wow, that was super important information we definitely could have used earlier. Leaven measures the interior of the cube to be 14 feet in diameter, and deduces that 27x27 cubes would fit flush with the shell, so 26x26 cubes would be accurate according to Worth’s statement. But 434 divided by 14 equals 31 rooms flush and 30 rooms with space. According to Leavens calculations of 27 rooms flush, 26 with space, that would mean each cube is 16 feet and some change. She’s probably assuming 1 foot of hatchway on either side plus some siding which makes the difference. This means there are 17576 rooms total. To put it in perspective, the cube is just a little bit smaller than NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building. It’s big, but definitely not 2000 aircraft carriers worth. Leaven has another epiphany, that the numbers are not just correlated to whether or not the rooms are trapped, but that they might be coded cartesian coordinates, which are grid coordinates for a 3 dimensional space. If you’re wondering, she yells Descartes because cartesian coordinates were named after him. She thinks that if you add up the numbers in each 3 digit sequence, it will provide an x,y,z coordinate. The decoding seems arbitrary and unlikely to be discovered, but for someone with a math eye.. It’s still pretty arbitrary and unlikely to be discovered. I guess knowing that the maximum size of the shell is 27x27x27 and that the number layout coupled with the maximum number sequence could be 999,999,999 might lead her to add up the 9’s to get 27x27x27. This also works because so far, they have not come across negative or zero room numbers. A negative number would enable the cube to be bigger than 27 cubes per side. This indicates that the smallest room number would be 001,001,001, or x,y, and z all equal 1. The cartesian coordinate scheme seems to work with everything else they know but there are some things that are odd. Worth mentioned that the shell has a door, and that there is 1 cube worth of space between the main cube and shell. According to this cartesian coordinate scheme, a cube could fill that gap. But if a cube could fill that gap, why is it empty space according to Worth? Also, the room numbers are obviously not cartesian coordinates of their current location. Every room around them and that they’ve passed through have seemingly random coordinates. If you go in one direction on the x-axis, you should expect that the numbers will increase or decrease, but they don’t. Does this mean the cartesian coordinate theory is busted, no. Like the prime number theory, it’s most likely a bit more involved. I think right now it’s probably a bit of a stretch, but definitely within the possibility for Leaven and Worth to determine that the logic gap between improperly located cartesian coordinates, the theoretical ability for a cube to be located between the shell and the main cube, and the sound and tremors, is that the cubes might be moving and their might be a cube between the shell and the main cube which could be an exit. Leaven misses all this and decodes their rooms coordinates to x=19, y=26 and doesn’t bother with the z axis. She then announces that they are only 7 rooms from the side. If you thought these numbers were the cartesian coordinates of this room’s current location, wouldn’t it be common sense to go up. You don’t know which side is the x or z axis, and you don’t know if you are going forward or reverse. You do know up from down and right now you think you’re 26 from 27 total cubes. You should be at the edge or outside of the main cube. Just go up. Pretty stupid. Regardless of where they actually are in the cube, going topside will enable them to confirm the size of the cube, shell, space between the cube and the shell, confirm if any cubes are between the cube and the shell, and give them a view of 5 out of the 6 sides of the cube to identify an exit location. Logically, it makes sense that an exit would not be on the bottom, because if one shell is 16 feet tall, and that’s the height of the gap between the cube and the shell, you could drop down to the exit easily with a clothing rope. Logically, they would put the exit in the most difficult location, which is the roof. Traps are still a problem, but if it’s not prime they can sniff, slap, and boot the room to cut the risk substantially. Eventually Leaven figures out these issues when the next room has non-sequential coordinates of 14,27,14. This is an incredible piece to the puzzle though. Before we could only speculate that a cube could be outside the main cube, but this room is proof that a room could have cartesian coordinates outside the shell. Knowing the door is at the shell, and the cube would act as a bridge to it should be pretty obvious by this point. Still, what’s it doing here, obviously this isn’t the top of the cube. The largest discrepancy they need to resolve right now is why cartesian coordinates haven’t matched up with a cubes actual location, because right now they have no idea where they actually are in the cube. After that, figure out why the trap detection method worked then stopped working. Leaven has been finding abstract patterns in the numbers left and right so far, I'm sure something will hit her. The crew disregards the top of the cube as having any merits, and decides to go downwards? Holloway mentions that the edge seems to be surrounded by traps. Quentin agrees and thinks they should cross it anyways. They seem to think that every cube 1 from the edge is trapped, but how could they possibly know this if they have no idea where they are. Going downwards is dumb anyways. With patience and wits running thin, they decide to sneak across this cube’s sound activated shish kebab trap. Problem is, Kazan’s tourette syndrome could cause the trap to activate once they are inside the cube. Personally, I'd put him in a previous room and gag him with a t-shirt. Once everyone’s through, Holloway can then bring Kazan across too. You better have good proprioception, if you accidentally knee-knock the wall you’ll get run through seven ways to sunday. Leaven and Holloway both sneak through at the same time, and Worth hops back in to help them. It’s really unnecessary and risky to have so many people inside the cube at a time. Poor Kazan goes the wrong way, gets caught on the door handle, and almost shrieks before Holloway jumps back and helps him out. Yah Kazan messed up and almost got you killed, but why on Earth did you stop when you got to the corridor. You should have just jumped in the hatch immediately. Holloway stops Quentin from beating the hell out of Kazan for almost getting him killed, and a fight ensues between them. The fact that they are right next to the outside of the cube diverts their attention. They open the door and, well, Worth was right. There’s a shell 1 cube from the main cube. It’s pretty dark, so they decide to fashion a shirt rope to swing Holloway over and see if there’s anything out there since she’s the lightest and they can’t risk Leaven’s life. What I don’t understand is why they all support Holloway like they are playing tug of war. You could easily tie the clothing rope off on any number of things in the cube while still holding on and bracing yourselves against the hatchway entrance. This would remove the risk of you guys dropping her and give Holloway more slack. Holloway tries to swing to the shell which puts a lot of strain on the others, but I can’t really see why she tried this. She can clearly see that it’s just a solid wall. If there’s a door, it’s probably not on this side like Worth said. Whatever was making the noise at each interval occurs again, causing a tremor that magically makes everyone release their grasp of the rope. Quentin is the only one that dives for the rope to save Holloway from falling to death. Wow, that was cold as shit Quentin. Yah they had an argument earlier, but damn. I saw some people saying that Holloway should have yelled something like, “He’s going to drop me on purpose, please stop him from murdering me.”, but I doubt she could have gotten a word out before he dropped her. Quentin stupidly dropped the shirt rope too, it’s not like that could be helpful on their journey. Worth and Leaven are suspicious, but they don’t know for a fact he killed Holloway. Everyone’s pretty distraught and delirious by now, so they decide to take a nap while listening to creepy ass theme music. Crazy-eyed Quentin absolutely loses it and tries to take Leaven and leave everyone else behind. Worth and Kazan pursue Quentin and save her, but Worth gets his ass kicked and booted into the next cube by Quentin in his illogical search to find the bottom for an exit. To Quentin’s dismay, Worth starts laughing maniacally, because the cube he was just pushed into contained none other than Renne’s corroded corpse. At first glance it seems they’ve gone full circle. But it should be obvious that they haven’t. They should know they haven’t backtracked that much, and that currently they are right next to the edge of the cube, which wasn’t the case earlier. It’s more likely that the rooms have been moving like the inaccurate cartesian coordinates have been suggesting all along. I do want to point out that it is extremely lucky that they managed to stumble back into the Rennes Room out of 17,576 moving rooms. To most of our protagonists, all hope seems lost. But Worth realizes they haven’t gone full-circle. He cracks the door where the wrenster got smoked, and yep, now it’s just open air. With the moving cubes puzzle piece, Leaven is graced with another mathematical revelation. The cartesian coordinates are indicative of the cubes starting positions. This solves the exit path problem. Theoretically and empirically we know that some cubes have starting positions outside the main 26x26 cube, like the 14,27,14 cube. According to Worth and our observations, there don’t appear to be any cubes that were situated outside the main cube. This indicates that the cubes with a 27 starting location are rare, and possibly only the one they encountered exists. Also according to Worth, there is one door on the shell. Since this rare or single cube with a 27 starting coordinate would fit flush with the shell, it’s likely that it’s a bridge to the shell where an exit would lie, but only when it’s in it’s starting position. Unfortunately, this exit path solution presents more problems. How do they locate a cube when all the cubes are being shuffled around and they only know their starting positions. Knowing that you can navigate a map using permutations of cartesian coordinates, and since the numbers have been the key to everything so far, Leaven and Worth figure that the permutations are encoded in these numbers as well. Leaven runs through some numbers and ideas pretty quickly, so let’s break down what she’s thinking. She mentions that to find the starting cartesian coordinates, you add the 3 digit number sequences together, to find the permutations, you subtract the numbers from each other. Then she says that their current room moves to 0,1,-1 on the x-axis. 2,5,-7 on the y-axis. And 1,-1,0 on the z-axis. We can deduce the equation she’s using from this. For example, with the room number 242 536 645. To decode the cartesian coordinate starting position, you would do (2+4+2),(5+3+6),(6+4+5). This equals 8,14,15. Now, the permutation would be decoded by doing the opposite, sort of. You would subtract each number from each other in the 3 digit sequences, like this. ((2-4)+(4-2)+(2-2)),((5-3)+(3-6)+(6-5)),((6-4)+(4-5)+(5-6)) which equals (-2,2,0), (2,-3,1),(2,-1,1). This seems to work because each set cancels itself out to 0. Meaning that a cube’s starting and ending positions are the same. To verify her theory, she needs to calculate the permutations of surrounding cubes not only determine if they conflict or not, but also to figure out where they are in the cycle and if they are on the z or x axis. How does this all work? I’ll try to explain. Leaven asks Worth and Quentin to give her the room numbers of surrounding rooms as a reference point. These are the numbers and thus permutations of the surrounding cubes: Worth Room #1: 666,897,466 or 18,24,16 or (0,0,0) (-1,2,-1) (-2,0,2) Quentin Room #2: 567,898,545 or 18,25,14 or (-1,-1,2) (-1,1,0) (1,-1,0) Worth Room #3: 656,778,462 or 17,22,12 or (1,-1,0) (0,-1,1) (-2,4,-2) We aren’t given the room number of their current room, but we are given the permutations, which are: (0,1,-1) (2,5,-7) (1,-1,0) And we are also told by Leaven that this room, and in conjunction the Bridge Room, is 2 movements from it’s starting position. Before we continue, I want to point out that the numbers provided here don’t strictly add up given the permutation decoding scheme. Either I and a bunch of other people are wrong.. ..there’s missing info, or the movie made mistakes. It was incredibly frustrating to try to make sense of it, but i’ll give you my train of thought and let you decide if I’m right or missing something. I did mess up, the y and z axes should be flipped. The Z should be the vertical axis... To reiterate: In order to verify her theory, she needs to calculate the permutations of surrounding cubes not only determine if they conflict or not, but also to figure out where they are in the cycle and if they are on the z or x axis. The reference room data is as follows: Worth Room #1: 666,897,466 or 18,24,16 or (0,0,0) (-1,2,-1) (-2,0,2) Starting Position: 18,24,16 First Position: 18,23,14 Second Position: 18,25,14 Starting Position: 18,24,16 Quentin Room #2: 567,898,545 or 18,25,14 or (-1,-1,2) (-1,1,0) (1,-1,0) Starting Position: 18,25,14 First Position: 17,26,15 Second Position: 16,25,14 Starting Position: 18,25,14 Worth Room #3: 656,778,462 or 17,22,12 or (1,-1,0) (0,-1,1) (-2,4,-2) Starting Position: 17,22,12 First Position: 18,22,10 Second Position: 17,21,14 Starting Position: 17,22,12 Current Room: X,X,X or 16,18,14 or (0,1,-1) (2,5,-7) (1,-1,0) Starting Position: 16,18,14 First Position: 16,20,15 Second Position: 17,25,14 Starting Position: 16,18,14 Bare with me here. Like I said earlier, the numbers don’t make sense in some spots. Worth Room #3 will never be on the same y-axis as their current room, so this room should have different numbering. Likewise, none of these rooms will ever be near the edge of the cube, but Worth was just seen next to an open door with nothing but air outside. Anyways, to verify her permutation theory, she would need to ensure that there are no conflicting permutations, where two cubes would be in the same location at one time. This checks out thankfully. To figure out where in the cycle they are at, she needs to basically find the coinciding permutations that line up on the x and y axis. Worth Room #1 and Quentin Room #2 both line up on the same y-axis as their current room, and are also lined up on either side of their current room on the x-axis when in the second position. Leaven even mentions the room number 17,25,14, though she never told us what that meant, now we know that she’s referring to the cartesian coordinates of the second position of their current room. She also mentions that the current room makes 2 more moves before returning to its original position. Which is a problem because according to our figures, it should be in 1 move. There’s a second problem too, the current room’s permutation and cartesian coordinates are also incompatible, there’s no way to produce a compatible room number with both of these decoded sets. But theoretically this is how you would know your current position in the cycle. Let’s say the movie screwed up and all this should check out. They also need to orient themselves correctly, so they need to know which direction is the x axis and z axis. Using our above calculations they would know that the three rooms with sequential x-axis numbers would be the x-axis, and perpendicular to it would be the z-axis. Now they are properly oriented within the cube. Great, the decoding scheme seems to check out if you ignore a lot of the problems with it. Funny how that works. If you have problems just ignore them and everything will check out. With their current location and orientation, they should be able to find the bridge room, right? Yes, but for the wrong reasons. The numbers continue to break down and give us more problems. Here is what we can decode from the bridge room cartesian coordinates. Bridge Room: X,999,X or 14,27,14 or (X) (0,0,0) (X) Starting Position: 14,27,14 First Position: X,27,X Second Position: X,27,X Starting Position: 14,27,14 The only way to express 27 as a room number sequence is 999, and the permutation for that would be ((9-9)+(9-9)+(9-9)) which equals a movement cycle of 0,0,0. This means the bridge cube wouldn’t move from its starting position on the y axis, which means they would have never encountered it from inside the cube. If they did somehow stumble into the bridge room, based on this permutation encoding scheme, it would be impossible not to notice. They’d be surrounded by air on 4 sides, the ceiling on the top, and the cube they entered from on the bottom. They don’t really need to know though. Now that they are oriented on the z and x axis and have their current location, they can accurately move to the adjacent cubes next to 14,27,14’s starting position and wait for it. At their assumed current position of 17,25,14, this puts them 3 cubes away on the x-axis, and 1 cube away on the y-axis from the cube that will be adjacent to the bridge cube in it’s starting position. But wait, there’s more problems. They have no idea what the movement timing and sequence is. From my calculations based on movie timing, a cube moves every 4 minutes or so, and the late-wrenster said that they were regular intervals each time. However, this could just be the movements that they were able to notice from their position inside the cube. Cubes could have been moving that they weren’t able to feel. We know not all cubes move at the same time, and likely only a couple cube moves at a time. The entire time they have been in the cube, they haven’t been inside a cube that was moving. This means that independent cubes, like their current cube and the fantastical bridge room will likely be at different stages in their rotations. It gets worse. According to her permutation theory, each cube could move a minimum of 3 times, and a maximum of 9 times before returning to the starting position. However, these could be executed forwards, in reverse, one axis at a time, multiple axis at a time, and any combination thereof. With all this shitty incongruent math, and considering they may be 3 cubes across and 1 cube under where they need to be, I'd just go topside and wait for the bridge cube to get into position, then break open the side doors and hop in. They need to head topside to get to the bridge anyways, so why stick around doing more math problems. They already know where the puck is going, just stake in that direction. Instead, they obsess over the slightly faulty trap detection method. 4 cubes away isn’t a problem, with the immensely high probability of correct trap detection, and their current method of no-prime, sniff, slap, and boot, it shouldn’t be a problem. Okay.. re-evaluating trap detection theory still isn’t necessary, but screw it let's do it. Leaven says that at first she thought trap rooms were identified if any 3 digit sequence in the room number was a prime number, but now she thinks trapped rooms are identified based on numbers that are the power of a prime. What led her to believe that? This doesn’t even make any sense. I swear to god, at this point I think she’s just making shit up to sound relevant. When pressured by Quentin to figure out the numbers so they can escape she retorts: So you can’t calculate the factors in each set of numbers to assess whether or not a room is trapped, but somehow you know that this is the solution for trap detection? Okay. The problem is that prime numbers and products of prime powers are different sets of numbers. A product of a prime power can’t be prime itself. So if traps were only identified by prime powers their previous trap detection method wouldn’t have worked so well. Prime powers are composite numbers. For example 5x5x5=125. This is the product of a prime power, but it also is a composite number. My guess is that Leaven meant that traps are detected if the number is prime OR a product of a prime power. Come on Leaven, be clear for Christ's sake. The pain continues as my confusion is reignited yet again. When Leaven says she can’t even calculate the factors of 567, Kazan blurts out the number 2. Which is odd. So She asks him again, to which he replies 2, again. He has a habit of repeating words, so she then throws him a tee-ball number that she can verify which has an answer different than 2. So she asks, how many factors does 30 have, he says 3. Worth then gives Kazan the rest of the numbers to the next room. Kazan answers that 898 is 2 and 545 is 2. Leaven gasps, “he’s giving us the factors”. Except he’s not. He’s giving you the number of unique prime factors. For example: 567 has 10 factors. 1, 3, 7, 9, 21, 27, 63, 81, 189, 567. The unique prime factors would be 3 and 7. 2 numbers total. 2 is a prime number and doesn’t indicate if a room is the product of a prime power either. I don’t get it. I probably just suck at math and don’t understand something though. Leaven’s not communicating clearly, and she’s only relying on a savant to compute things based on the muddy context she provided. Autistic savant’s like Kazan often have an extraordinary area of knowledge or ability in a single capacity, but otherwise have immense trouble with understanding things like language. So for him to understand what she’s saying is unlikely. Hell, I can’t either. Leaven says that based on Kazan’s answers, the next room is safe. You’re not even going to check his math at all? Even if you did, like your prime number theory, you don’t know if it works with any degree of confidence. Hell, there is even less confidence that this method works versus the previous method, and now you don’t have a boot to test it. I’d just continue with the old method that had a high confidence and success rate. Technically you could go back and test the rooms you already know are safe, but since you didn’t use line markers you probably forgot which ones were safe. I guess you could also use Rennes corpse as a ‘boot’ to test the next rooms. Or you can just throw Worth in I guess. They are going in the Quentin #2 room direction. According to our previous calculations, this is the right direction if they are heading towards the bridge room. They then progress further into the 15,25,14. When Quentin tries to follow them, Worth shoves the door up into Quentin’s neck. There’s that crazy-eyed Quentin. Worth stalls Quentin while Kazan and Leaven try to escape into the 14,25,14 room. They should head upwards now, but instead move forward another cube. But i’m sure Leaven magically figured out some other decoding scheme and knows where the bridge room is. Their next move is trapped though, so to throw Quentin off their tail they stage their own trap. That’s clever and all, but super impractical. You have to make sure that Quentin steps on top of the door, then when you try to open the door it will make noise and it has to come out then slide over. It just wouldn’t really work. Movie magic says otherwise and Quentin fell on his head. With the amount of blood coming out of his head, I think they’re safe from him now. From their 14,25,14 room, they move across the z and x axis a few times and reach a giant vertical shaft where cubes should be. They’ve positioned themselves 1 cube across from where the bridge cube’s next position will be. The bridge cube comes down to their cube, and they hop in to ride it to the pearly gates. Interestingly, this cube moved down, then back up, suggesting that the cubes immediately moved a full cycle across one axis before rotating across the other axis. There was no way of knowing this so finding the bridge cube again is highly improbable. Kazan failed to make the jump in time, and Leavenworth’s cube moved up 1 spot. Worth graciously comes to Kazan’s rescue by going left then down. Which doesn’t make sense either. While Worth is hauling Kazan’s ass back, Leaven checks the room number of their current room. It’s 14,26,14. Then she says this room’s next move takes them under the bridge room. So this isn’t the bridge room, this was the room that cycles next to the bridge room. How are you calculating the timing of all these rotations anyways. I’m having a hard freaking time believing and following this. More like you should have gone topside as soon as Worth told you about the cube and you had discovered the 14,27,14 room. Once their cube’s movement is complete they go across it and open the other side’s door to the bridge cube. Wouldn’t they be under the bridge cube, meaning they’d have to go upwards to get to the bridge? And once inside the bridge cube, wouldn’t the exit be on the roof as the bridge cube can never be near any sides? I swear to god I must be losing my shit. Before when Leaven came across the 14,27,14 room it was white, and now it’s red? What are you all waiting for, freaking go, these cubes move fast and you’re going to miss your only chance. Oh great now he’s sitting down. Oh here we go again with the Edgar Allan Poe bs. The only stupidity I'm seeing here is that the dumbass that helped build this thing is now giving up 2 yards from the endzone. Fine dude cya later. No. No. No. That’s not possible. 1. This dude's head was busted open and bleeding all over from the fall. 2. With his lack of knowledge of math he’d have definitely run into trap rooms 3. Leaven, Worth and Kazan not only moved across numerous cubes, but also those cubes they moved into moved far distances 2 times as well. This epitomizes the incongruency I've been struggling to make sense of this whole movie. Worth doesn’t allow Quentin to go free, and holds his leg so Quentin gets caught in between the moving cubes. Kazan is the only one that makes it out alive, though we can’t be sure. The light at the end of the tunnel might be a train and all. The movie ends. Lets recap to see who could have lived or was destined to die. This has been a long ass video so let me be brief. Alderson couldn’t have survived. The Rennes couldn’t have survived. Everyone else shouldn’t have survived, and only did so because of plot math. My soul didn’t survive. Movies that rely on details then screw those details up are extremely frustrating. How dare they not accommodate YouTubers that over analyze their low budget pseudo math dramas. I’d say that due to all the failure and incongruencies, this movie wasn’t beaten. That’s the first time I've said a movie can’t be beaten. Bravo Cube 1997, and fuck you. I’d rather take my chances in a zombie apocalypse any day. I know there are cube sequels but I need to let these wounds heal by doing a dumb movie next. So let me know what dumb movies you want to see. Thanks for watching, and remember, be nice to nerds.
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Channel: Nerd Explains
Views: 1,904,774
Rating: 4.9114223 out of 5
Keywords: Nerd Explains, How to Beat, Cube Movie, Cube 1997, Cube 1997 Explained, Cube 1997 Ending, Cube 1997 Ending Explained, How to Beat Cube, How to Survive Cube, Dead Meat, Ending Explained, FoundFlix, Kil Count
Id: XkYvo6S82LE
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 46min 24sec (2784 seconds)
Published: Thu Nov 05 2020
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