Rubik Article

Rubicks Cube

Twist the faces in some random sequence five or six times, and you have a cube so scrambled that only an expert—a cubemeister—can restore order. The object of the puzzle is to put an arbitrarily scrambled cube back into its original state, one solid color per face, thereby “solving” the cube. If we overlook the colours of the stickers, then turning a face by a quarter turn leaves the cube apparently unchanged. The same is true of any arbitrarily long sequence of turns carried out in succession - the net result does not change the shape of the cube, and so any sequence of turns is also a symmetry operation. Most Rubik's Cubes are sold without any markings on the center faces. This obscures the fact that the center faces can rotate independently.

There is a beautiful construction which can be illustrated using the subgroup generated by rotations of two adjacent faces, namely the construction of the outer automorphism of the symmetric group of degree six. Finally, if time and the interests of the audience permit, we may consider the question of how quickly a sequence of random moves will scramble the cube, a mathematically interesting problem. Getting all the faces unscrambled can be a nightmare.

When you are done with the last corner, the cube will magically be solved. Magic Cube was held together with interlocking plastic pieces that were less expensive to produce than the magnets in Nichols's design. In September 1979, a deal was signed with Ideal Toys to bring the Magic Cube to the Western world, and the puzzle made its debut at toy fairs in January and February 1980. MagicCube3D is another good way to try to understand all this by dimensional analogy.