The Rubik's Cube

Hungarian scientist, mathematician and inventor Erno Rubik invented the Rubik’s Cube back in 1974 as a puzzle to frustrate his daughter. Time and again throughout her formative years this lonely child, growing-up in Hungary’s remote TransDanubian plains, would pester her father to move to the city so that she could have some playmates and he could meet a new wife – her mother having died in childbirth.

Rubik was a Soviet scientist employed by the State to solve mathematical problems relating to the overheating of the nearby Paksi Atomerőmű nuclear powerstation. Under such political conditions as existed in Hungary in the early 1970’s it was no simple task to just up-sticks and move and so, to delay the inevitable disappointment of his daughter, Erno invented his, now famous, cube; saying that they could move to Budapest, the country’s capital, when she had solved its mystery.

The Rubik’s cube itself is made of 54 coloured squares based around a six-sided cube. Each row and column of squares can rotate 360 degrees around the cube. The idea is to manipulate these rotations so that there are nine squares of equal colour on each face of the cube. At first glance the puzzle is not so daunting but, within 3 or 4 twists of the device most people feel they have entered a version of Hell. So seemingly impossible is the toy that companies as diverse as Google, Honda and DeloitteConsulting have used it to screen potential employees for technically specialist jobs.

I was given my first Rubik’s cube for Christmas last year and I HATED IT! I had had a very good first 51 weeks of the year but the final week of the year was marred by this tricksy toy that instantly consumed my every waking moment. Like many exasperated players of the Cube I nearly resorted to ripping-off the coloured squares only to replace them at leisure in the desired order. However, a search of the internet turned up a system, devised by one Denny Dedmore of Drebble Heights, Delaware, to overcome the cube based on certain features of the cube’s patterns that never alter. Thanks to Denny’s deductions I can now solve a messed-up cube in less than 20 minutes. The current world record, by 17 year-old, Dustin Spanker from Pontefract, West Yorkshire, is 9.3 secs on average.

Sadly, Rubik’s daughter died on a bus heading for the 1974 Eurovision song contest.