By Siobhan Roberts
Erno Rubik, the Cube’s inventor, dates the Cube to the spring of 1974. Preparing a course on descriptive geometry and tinkering with the five Platonic solids, he had become especially taken by the cube. But, as he wrote in his 2020 memoir, “Cubed, The Puzzle of Us All,” for quite a while it “never once occurred to me that I was creating a puzzle.”
By about the time of his 30th birthday, in July 1974, he had created the structure, realised its puzzling potential and — after playing with it intermittently for a few months — solved the Cube for the first time. He submitted a patent application in January 1975, and by the end of 1977 the “Magic Cube” had debuted in toy stores in Hungary. Travelers spirited it out “in their luggage, next to other Hungarian delicacies like sausage and Tokaji wine,” he recalled.
One avid exporter and ambassador was David Singmaster, a mathematician who wrote the book “Notes on Rubik’s ‘Magic Cube.’” Therein he outlined a notation for the faces — Up (U), Down (D), Right (R), Left (L), Front (F), Back (B) — providing a way to orient the Cube and refer to its pieces, positions and turns. He also gave a step-by-step solution guide. And he reported a hazard: Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, a British politician and recreational mathematician, had developed a case of “‘cubist’s thumb,’ a form of tendinitis requiring minor but delicate surgery for its relief.”
CubeLovers was among the first internet mailing lists — the inaugural message was sent by an MIT student in July 1980: “I don’t know what we will be talking about, but another mailing list cannot hurt (too much).” In March 1981, with the Cube having been renamed for Rubik and populating American toy stores, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter diagnosed the craze as “cubitis magikia” — “a severe mental disorder accompanied by itching of the fingertips, which can be relieved only by prolonged contact with a multicolored cube,” he wrote in his column for Scientific American. He added: “Symptoms often last for months. Highly contagious.”
By November 1982, the mania had subsided — “Rubik’s Cube: A Craze Ends,” declared a headline in the The New York Times. But it was resurrected in the 1990s by the World Wide Web. In 2023, Spin Master, the toy company that now owns the brand, globally sold 7.4 million units, including both the classic Cube and related twisty puzzles. Ben Varadi, a Spin Master co-founder, noted that Rubik’s has “95 per cent brand awareness” — virtually everyone has heard of it. Rubik’s lore also holds that 1 in 7 people on Earth have played with the Cube. “It gives me hope about the world,” Rubik told his audience in San Francisco. “It brings people together.”
According to Tomas Rokick, a cube enthusiast, it scrambles into some 43 billion billion colorful combinations. “A reasonably big number,” he said, possibly more than all the grains of sand in the world.
Part of the puzzle’s appeal is the complexity that emerges from its simplicity. The Cube is composed of the 20 smaller “cubies” (eight corners and 12 edges centered between the corners) and six face-center pieces attached to the core. The core mechanism is anchored by a 3D cross, around which tabs on the edge and corner cubies interlock in a geometrically ingenious way that allows the structure to rotate.
The cubies display 54 colorful facets, nine each of white, red, blue, orange, yellow and green. In its solved state, the Cube’s six faces are configured such that all nine facets are the same color. Turning the puzzle scrambles the colors — in total, there are precisely 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible positions into which the facets can be permuted.
All the while, the puzzle’s essential form — its cubic-ness — remains unchanged. This feature demonstrates group theory, the mathematical study of symmetry: A so-called symmetry group of a geometric object is the collection, or group, of transformations that can be applied to the object but that nonetheless leave the structure preserved. A square has eight symmetries: It can be rotated or reflected four ways each and it’s still a square. A plain cube has 48 symmetries. The Rubik’s Cube has some 43 quintillion.
These symmetries are a “fantastic property,” Rokicki said, that “really gives the Cube its elegance.” In much the same spirit, the recreational math gathering included talks about how to build an origami computer; the controlled art of juggling (versus “joggling,” uncontrollably chasing after balls); and enumerative problems in knitting.
There are many paths to solving the Cube. During his lecture, Rokicki zeroed in on a specific number: What is the minimum number of moves necessary to solve even the most scrambled positions?
Rokicki set out to calculate this quantity, known as God’s number, in 1999. In 2010 he found the answer: 20. He had the help of many talented people, particularly Herbert Kociemba, a German hobbyist cuber and programmer known for his namesake algorithm. The feat also benefited from a lot of computer time donated by Google, and another algorithm that took advantage of the Cube’s symmetries, reducing the number of necessary calculations by a factor of 48, and in turn reducing the necessary computing power.
Rokicki’s current obsession is identifying all of the God’s number positions — they are “extremely rare, really hard to find,” he told the audience. As he spoke, three computers in his home spun away on the task — their combined 336 gigabytes excavate about 100,000 distance-20 positions per day. So far, Rokicki has a database of about 100 million. “They are mathematical gems,” he said. — The New York Times
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