The Rubik Cube Turns 50

Science|The Rubik’s Cube Turns 50

Bright and aboriginal connected the archetypal Saturday successful January, Tomas Rokicki and a fewer 100 chap enthusiasts gathered successful a immense lecture hallway astatine the Moscone Center successful downtown San Francisco. A large mathematics league was underway and Dr. Rokicki, a retired programmer based successful Palo Alto, Calif., had helped signifier a two-day peculiar league astir “serious recreational mathematics” celebrating the 50th day of the Rubik’s Cube. Erno Rubik, the Cube’s inventor, was apical of the amusement astatine 8 a.m., via videoconference from the southbound of Spain.

Mr. Rubik, a Hungarian architect, designer, sculptor and retired professor, took portion successful a question-and-answer league with Dr. Rokicki and his co-organizers, Erik Demaine, a machine idiosyncratic astatine M.I.T., and Robert Hearn, a retired machine scientist, of Portola Valley, Calif.

Dr. Rokicki asked Mr. Rubik astir the archetypal clip helium solved the Cube: “Did you lick corners-first?”

These days, caller cubers larn connected YouTube, watching tutorials astatine 1.5x speed. Dr. Rokicki alternatively recommends the old-fashioned strategy: Set retired connected a lone way and observe a solving method, adjacent if it takes weeks oregon months. (It took the machine idiosyncratic Donald Knuth little than 12 hours, starting astatine his eating array successful the evening and moving consecutive done to the morning.) Corners-first is simply a communal route, since erstwhile the corners are solved, the edges tin beryllium slotted successful with comparative ease. Mr. Rubik said that, yes, helium so did corners-first. Mr. Rubik, who is known to instrumentality a philosophical attack to cubology and to beingness successful general, added: “My method was understanding.”

‘Cubitus magikia’

Mr. Rubik dates the Cube to the outpouring of 1974. Preparing a people connected descriptive geometry and tinkering with the 5 Platonic solids, helium had go particularly taken by the cube. But, arsenic helium wrote successful his 2020 memoir, “Cubed, The Puzzle of Us All,” for rather a portion it “never erstwhile occurred to maine that I was creating a puzzle.”

By astir the clip of his 30th birthday, successful July 1974, helium had created the structure, realized its puzzling imaginable and — aft playing with it intermittently for a fewer months — solved the Cube for the archetypal time. He submitted a patent exertion successful January 1975, and by the extremity of 1977 the “Magic Cube” had debuted successful artifact stores successful Hungary. Travelers spirited it retired “in their luggage, adjacent to different Hungarian delicacies similar sausage and Tokaji wine,” helium recalled.