Four new records for Rubik's cube at 50.

To honor its 50th anniversary, the Rubiks Cube set four new world, European, and national records. The achievement was accomplished at the European Rubiks Cube Championship in Pamplona, including four days of dedicated cube play. Over 1,200 people from 60 countries competed to solve Rubiks fastest. Seven finals have been reached by Spanish players in over 17 modalities. The Rubiks Cube has transcended generations and spaces, becoming a lasting culture with devotees worldwide. This competition is the largest in the world due to the Rubiks Cube’s entertainment and challenge.

Tomas Rokicki and a few hundred enthusiasts met in a large lecture hall at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco early on the first Saturday in January. Dr. Rokicki, a retired Palo Alto programmer, organized a two-day special session on “serious recreational mathematics” to celebrate the Rubik’s Cube’s 50th anniversary at a large math conference. From southern Spain, Cube inventor Erno Rubik was the star at 8 a.m. via videoconference.

Dr. Rokicki, Erik Demaine, a computer scientist at M.I.T., and Robert Hearn, a retired computer scientist from Portola Valley, Calif., led a question-and-answer session with Mr. Rubik, a Hungarian architect, designer, sculptor, and retired professor.

Dr. Rokicki asked Mr. Rubik, “Did you solve corners-first?”

Modern cubers follow YouTube instructions at 1.5x speed. Dr. Rokicki suggests the old-fashioned approach: Set out alone and find a solution, even if it takes weeks or months. Starting at his dining table in the evening and working till morning, computer scientist Donald Knuth finished in less than 12 hours. Corners-first is common since edges can be easily slotted in after the corners are solved. Mr. Rubik confirmed he did corners-first. Philosophical cubologist Mr. Rubik said, “My method was understanding.”

Mr. Rubik dates the Cube to spring 1974. Preparing a descriptive geometry course and playing with the five Platonic solids, he was fascinated by the cube. According to his 2020 biography, “Cubed, The Puzzle of Us All,” it “never once occurred to me that I was creating a puzzle” for a long time.

He developed the structure, understood its puzzle potential, and solved the Cube for the first time after playing with it intermittently for a few months by July 1974, his 30th birthday. His patent application was filed in January 1975, and the “Magic Cube” arrived in Hungarian toy stores by 1977. He said travelers took it “in their luggage, next to other Hungarian delicacies like sausage and Tokaji wine.”

David Singmaster, a mathematician who wrote “Notes on Rubik’s ‘Magic Cube.’” was an enthusiastic exporter and promoter. He defined the faces’ notation—Up (U), Down (D), Right (R), Left (L), Front (F), Back (B)—to orient the Cube and refer to its pieces, positions, and turns. He provided a step-by-step solution. He identified a risk: British politician and recreational mathematician Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw suffered “‘cubist’s thumb,’ a form of tendinitis requiring minor but delicate surgery for its relief.”

CubeLovers was one of the original internet mailing lists, founded in July 1980 by an M.I.T. student: “I don’t know what we will be talking about, but another mailing list cannot hurt “. In March 1981, after the Cube was renamed for Rubik and appeared in American toy stores, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter called the craze “cubitis magikia”—“a severe mental disorder accompanied by itching of the fingertips, which can be relieved only by prolonged contact with a multicolored cube.” The symptoms can persist months, he said. Highly contagious.”

The New York Times headlined, “Rubik’s Cube: A Craze Ends,” in November 1982. The World Wide Web revived it in the 1990s. Spin Master, the toy firm that owns the brand, sold 7.4 million Cubes and twisty puzzles worldwide in 2023. Spin Master co-founder Ben Varadi said Rubik’s has “95 percent brand awareness”—almost everyone knows it. Rubik claims that one in seven people on Earth have played with the Cube. “It gives me hope about the world,” Rubik told his San Francisco audience. “It unites people.”

After meeting Mr. Rubik, Dr. Rokicki spoke about Cube math. It scrambles into 43 billion billion multicolored combinations, he said. “A reasonably big number,” he said, probably more than all the sand in the globe.

Simple puzzles are appealing because they reveal complexity. The Cube has 20 tiny “cubies” (eight corners and 12 edges between the corners) and six face-center pieces attached to the core. The structure rotates around a 3-D cross where tabs on the edge and corner cubies interlock geometrically.

Cubies have 54 colorful sides—nine each of white, red, blue, orange, yellow, and green. When solved, the Cube’s six faces have the same hue on all nine sides. Turning the puzzle scrambles the colors; there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 permutations.

The puzzle’s cubic shape remains. This shows group theory, the mathematical study of symmetry: The symmetry group of a geometric object is the set of transformations that preserve its structure. A square has eight symmetries: It remain square when rotated or mirrored four times. A simple cube has 48 symmetry. The Rubik’s Cube has 43 quintillion.

Dr. Rokicki called these symmetries “fantastic property” that “really gives the Cube its elegance.”

In the same spirit, the recreational math meeting covered origami computer construction, controlled juggling (vs “joggling,” wildly pursuing balls), and knitting enumerative problems.

Mathematician and writer Barry Cipra posted his bricklayer’s challenge wooden tray puzzle. The setup: four rows of six brick-like blocks of various lengths. Goal: Arrange bricks so no vertical seams align between horizontal rows.

Dr. Cipra invited numerous audience members to the stage, where they tried to solve one of the puzzle’s 2,184 solutions. This group included Bram Cohen, a computer programmer and BitTorrent inventor who created Rubik’s-like puzzles like the Maltese Gear Cube (with Oskar van Deventer), and Rivka Lipkovitz, a rising high school senior and speedcuber (official personal record in competition, 14.71 seconds; personal at home, 10.75).

Cubic encounters
There are various Cube solutions. Dr. Rokicki focused on a number during his lecture: What is the minimal number of moves to solve even the most complicated positions?

Dr. Rokicki decided to determine God’s number in 1999. The answer was 20 in 2010. Many talented people helped him, including Herbert Kociemba, a German amateur cuber and programmer famed for his namesake algorithm. Google gave a lot of computer time, and another program took advantage of the Cube’s symmetries to reduce calculations by 48 and computing power.

Dr. Rokicki told the audience that locating all of God’s numerical positions is his current focus because they are “extremely rare, really hard to find.” His three home computers, totaling 336 terabytes, excavated 100,000 distance-20 locations per day as he spoke. The Dr. Rokicki database is roughly 100 million. “They are mathematical gems,” he remarked.

Four new records for Rubik’s cube at 50.

By ki0nk

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