The mind behind the Rubik’s Cube celebrates a lasting puzzle..

[DGUtley]

The mind behind the Rubik’s Cube celebrates a lasting puzzle..


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If you’ve ever had trouble solving a Rubik’s Cube, a good piece of advice is to break it down into steps. It’s worth a shot: That advice is from the man who invented it.
“Problem solving is a very basic activity of the human mind and if a problem is complex you need to divide the problem into smaller elements,” says Ernő Rubik, who invented the cube in 1974.


Rubik has seen his color-matching puzzle go from a classroom teaching tool in Cold War-era Hungary to a worldwide phenomenon with over 450 million cubes sold and a mini-empire of related toys.


The original 3x3 Rubik’s has more than 43 quintillion — that’s more than 43,000,000,000,000,000,000 — possible configurations, but the principles behind the cube have been refashioned for 2x2, 4x4 and 5x5 cubes, a board game called Rubik’s Race, a pyramid, a tower and a Christmas tree, among others.


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[LescoBrandon]

I've tried some of the "algorithms" which you can follow that will eventually stumble onto a solved cube, but haven't gotten the ones I've found to work, probably user error. But that's apparently how the speed solvers do it so quickly - memorize the algorithm and within 50 or so twists, you have a solved cube.

[DGUtley]

I have never solved it.


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[carolina73]

The original ones with the peel off stickers were easier to solve.

[jigglepete]

I could never solve those things, even after I realized that the middle cube on each side doesn't move (I was told just knowing that is a step in solving them)...I know a dairy farmer (never graduated high school, not judging, just saying) whose parents thought he might be a genius when he solved it, he didn't actually solve it but realized that the cubes are removeable with the proper fenagling, so now that I think about it he did solve it, he was merely thinking outside the box (or cube as the case may be).

[carolina73]

I just watched a History channel special on greatest toys. Of course Rubik's Cube was one of the top on the list.
Rubik was an architecture teacher in Hungary and built it to get his class thinking about colors in multi dimensions. He realized the addictive nature of it but he also did not know how to get the colors back in alignment (solve it). It took him some time to figure out the method because he knew he couldn't sell it without proving it could be solved. Problem 2 is that he was behind the iron Curtain and therefore it was not his invention. It belonged to the state. He finally worked out a deal with the government. He is now worth about 100 million USD.

[RMNIXON]

The original ones with the peel off stickers were easier to solve.

My younger brother solved it in minutes when he discovered that enough force would pull the mechanism apart and then you can snap it back in place solved.