Rubik’s Cube

1. Rubik’s Cube Flickflickflickflickflick… “Woah!”

2. History of the Cube • Developed by Hungarian sculptor/architecture professor, Erno Rubik, in 1974. • It hit the toy store shelves in 1980. As of January 2009, 350 million cubes have been sold, making it the best-selling toy in the world.

3. Mechanics of the Cube • The cube is comprised of a center piece with six pivot points, each attached to a corresponding middle square for each side of the cube. • These are the only adhesively bonded squares on the cube, which means the middle squares always stay in place in respect to one another. (This is a fundamental concept of the puzzle.)

5. The rest of the pieces are held together solely by tension. There are knobs protruding each block that meet in the middle. When you rotate a face of the cube, the knobs slide under the thin middle squares. If one block is removed, the rest of the cube easily crumbles. The lack of adhesion is when gives the cube its maneuverable characteristic. When the sides aren’t properly aligned, neither are the knobs, so they cannot form a flat, rotary disc to slide under the middle square. If you try to turn it in this state, the side will lock up. Mechanics of the Cube (cont.)

6. Corner piece Edge piece Here, you can see the protruding knobs on this partially disassembled Cube.

7. Theory of the Cube • Though on the box, it is advertised that there are “billions of possibilities”, there are actually about 43 quintillion possible orientations of the cube, but the marketers decided that was and incomprehensibly large number. • In 1982, two mathematicians: David Singmaster and Alexander Frey hypothesized that the number of moves needed to solve the Rubik’s Cube, given the ideal algorithm, might be in “the low twenties”. • In 2008, Thomas Rokicki proved through computer search methods that any configuration can be solved in 22 moves or less.