Seasons 7 and 8 have been exponentially worse in quality for so , so many reasons . I just watch the show out of habit . <| sep |> It depends on what you mean by a parity problem . The term has been skewed and misused so much that there isn ' t really a definition that cubers agree on . Ultimately , a parity issue is when you have to make an odd number of piece swaps . The reason they are difficult is because commutators can only do 3 cycles or even numbers of swaps . Odd nxnxn cubes with n 3 can have parity issues like a checkered edge where you ' d have swap the two wings . The only way you can swap two wing pieces is to also swap two center pieces , because the wing and center pieces have to have the same parity of exchanges since every move adds the same parity of swaps of edge pieces and of center pieces . This is what I call an equivocation parity issue but a lot of people refer to it as a false equivocation which doesn ' t makd sense because equivocation already implies that things aren ' t actually equivalent , but just appear so , and because there isn ' t a genuinely odd number of swaps being performed , they will often not refer to it as a parity issue . Then there are parity issues where there is a genuinely odd number of piece swaps being made . The reason these are tricky is because as I said , they can ' t be solved by commutators . These can arise because there is some basic move that introduces an odd number of swaps . For even nxnxn cubes , every move introduces an odd number of swaps , and so you can genuinely swap 2 pieces . People often call this a hidden layer parity , and while that is a good way of thinking about it for cubes , that definition doesn ' t hold up when actually discussing group theory , and it also doesn ' t really stand for noncubic puzzles that have parity issues . If , for example , you perform the Tperm on a 2 x 2 x 2 , you ' ll see that exactly 1 pair of pieces has been swapped . This is a very easy parity issue to get out of , but imagine that you are only capable of performing 3 cycles . You will never be able to solve that puzzle , unless you turn a face 90 degrees before performing more 3 cycles . Turning a face 90 degrees on a 2 x 2 x 2 actually adds an odd number of piece swaps , and then you can go back to using commutators to solve the rest . Edit changed some small mistakes