Rubik’s Cube

 

This article was written by Dustyn

The Rubik’s Cube is a 3-D combination puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and

professor of architecture Erno Rubik. Originally called the Magic Cube, the puzzle was

licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toy Corp. in 1980 via businessman Tibor Laczi and

Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer. Rubik’s Cube won the 1980 German Game of the Year

special award for Best Puzzle. As of January 2009, 350 million cubes had been sold

worldwide, making it the world’s top-selling game. It is widely considered to be the world’s

best-selling toy. On the original classic Rubik’s Cube, each of the six faces was covered by

nine stickers, each of the six solid colours: white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow. Some

later versions of the cube have been updated to use colored plastic panels instead, which

prevents peeling and fading. In currently sold models, white is opposite yellow blue is

opposite of green, and orange is opposite red, and red white, and blue are arranged in that

order in a clockwise arrangement. On early cubes, the position of the colours varied from

cube to cube. An internal pivot mechanism enables each face to turn independently, thus

mixing up the colours. For the puzzle to be solved, each face must be returned to have only

one colour. Similar puzzles have now been produced with various numbers of sides,

dimensions, and stickers, not all or them by Rubik. Although Rubik’s Cube reached its height

of mainstream popularity in the 1980s, it is still known and used. Many speed cubers

continue to practice it and similar puzzles; they also compete for the fastest times in various

categories. Since 2003. The World Cube Association, the international governing body of

Rubik’s Cube, has organized competitions worldwide and recognizes world records.

 Similar precursors

In March 1970, Nichols invented a 2x2x2 ‘’ Puzzle with Pieces Rotatable in Groups’’ and

filed a Canadian patent application for it. Nichols’s cube was held together by magnets.

Nichols was granted U.S. Patent 3,655,201 on 11 April 1972, two years before Rubik

invented his Cube. On 9 April 1970, Frank Fox applied to patent an ‘’amusement device’’, a

type of sliding puzzle on a spherical surface with ‘’at least two 3x3 arrays’’ intended to be

used for the game of nights and crosses. He received his UK patent (1344259) on 16

January 1974.

 Rubik’s invention

In the mid-1970s, Emo Rubik worked at the Department of Interior Design at the Academy of

Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest. Although it is widely reported that the cube was built as

a teaching tool to help his students understand 3D objects, his actual purpose was solving

the structural problem of moving the parts independently without the entire mechanism

falling apart. He did not realize that he had created a puzzle until the first time he scrambled

his new Cube and then tried to restore it. Rubik applied for a patent in Hungary for his

‘’Magic Cube’’ on 30 January 1975, and HU170062 was granted later that year. The first test

batches of the Magic Cube were produced in late 1977 and released in Budapest toy shops.

Magic Cube was held together with interlocking plastic pieces that prevented the puzzle

being easily pulled apart, unlike the magnets in Nichols’s design. With Erno Rubik’s

permission, businessman Tibor Laczi took a Cube to Germany’s Nuremberg Toy Fair in

February 1979 in an attempt to popularize it. It was noticed by Seven Towns founder Tom

Kremer, and they signed a deal with Ideal Toys in September 1979 to release the Magic

Cube worldwide. Ideal wanted at least a recognizable name to trademark; of course , that

arrangement put Rubik in the spotlight because the Magic Cube was renamed after its

inventors in 1980. The puzzle made its international debut at the toy fairs of London, Paris,

Nuremberg, and New York in January and February 1980. After its international debut, the

progress of the Cube towards the toy shop shelves of the West was briefly halted so that it

could be manufactured to Western safety and packaging specifications. A lighter Cube was

produced, and Ideal decided to rename it. ‘’The Gordian Knot’’ and ‘’Inca Gold’’ were

considered, but the company finally decided on ‘’Rubik’s Cube’’, and the first batch was

exported from Hungary in May 1980.

 1980s Cube craze

After the first batches of Rubik’s Cubes were released in May 1980, initial sales were

modest, but Ideal began a television advertising campaign in the middle of the year which it

supplemented with newspaper adverts. At the end of 1980, Rubik’s Cube won a German

Game of the Year special award and won similar awards for best toy in the UK, France, and

the US. By 1981, Rubik’s Cube had become a craze, and it is estimated that in the period

from 1980 to 1983 around 200 million Rubik’s Cubes were sold worldwide. In March 1981, a

speed cubing championship organized by the Guinness Book of World Records was held in

Munich, and a Rubik’s Cube was depicted on the front cover of Scientific American that

same month. In June 1981, The Washington Post reported that Rubik’s Cube is ‘’a puzzle

that’s moving like fast food right now … this year’s Hoola Hoop or Bongo Board’’, and by

September 1981, New Scientist noted that the cube had ‘’captivated the attention of children

of ages 7 to 70 all over the world this summer. As most people could solve only one or two

sides, numerous books were published including David Singmaster’s Notes on Rubik’s

‘’Magic Cube’’ (1980) and Patrick Bossert’s You Can do the Cube (1981). At one stage in

1981, three of the top ten best selling books in the US were books on solving Rubik’s Cube,

and the best-selling book of 1981 was James G. Nourse’s The Simple Solution to Rubik’s

Cube which sold over 6 million copies. In 1981, the Museum of Modern Art in New York

exhibited a Rubik’s Cube, and at the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee a six-foot

Cube was put on display. ABC Television even developed a cartoon show called Rubik, the

Amazing Cube. In June 1982, the First Rubik’s Cube World Championship took place in

Budapest and would become the only competition recognized as official until the

championship was revived in 2003. In October 1982, The New York Times reported that

sales had fallen and that ‘’the craze has died’’, and by 1983 it was clear that sales had

plummeted. However, in some Communist countries, such as China and the USSR, the

craze had started later and demand was still high because of a shortage of Cubes.

 21st-century revival

Rubik’s Cubes continued to be marketed and sold throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, but it was

not until the early 2000s that interest in the Cube began increasing again. In the US, sales

doubled between 2001 and 2003, and The Boston Globe remarked that it was ‘’becoming

cool to own a Cube again’’. The 2003 World Rubik’s Games Championship was the first

speed cubing tournament since 1982. It was held in Toronto and was attended by 83

participants. The tournament led to the formation of the World Cube Association in 2004.

Annual sales of Rubik branded cubes were said to have reached 15 million worldwide in

2008. Part of the new appeal was ascribed to the advent of Internet video sites, such as

YouTube which allowed fans to share their solving strategies. Following the expiration of

Rubik’s patent in 2000, other brands of cubes appeared, especially from Chinese

companies. Many of these Chinese branded cubes have been engineered for speed and are

favoured by speed cubers.

 Algorithms

In Rubik’s cuber's parlance, a memorized sequence of moves that has a desired effect on

the cube is called an algorithm. This terminology is derived from the mathematical use of

algorithm, meaning a list of well-defined instructions for performing a task from a given initial

state, through well-defined successive states, to a desired end-state. Each method of solving

the Cube employs its own set of algorithms, together with descriptions of what effect the

algorithm has, and when it can be used to bring the cube closer to being solved. Many

algorithms are designed to transform only a small part of the cube without interfering with

other parts that have already been solved so that they can be applied repeatedly to different

parts of the cube until the whole is solved. For example, there are well-known algorithms for

cycling three corners without changing the rest of the puzzle or flipping the orientation of a

pair of edges while leaving the others intact. Some algorithms do have a certain desired

effect on the cube (for example, swapping two corners) but may also have the side-effect of

changing other parts of the cube (such as permuting some edges). Such algorithms are

often simpler than the ones without side-effects and are employed early on in the solution

when most of the puzzles has not yet been solved and the side-effects are not important.

Most are long and difficult to memorize. Towards the end of the solution, the more specific (and usually more complicated) algorithms are used instead.