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The People Who Are Still Addicted To the Rubik's Cube
An anonymous reader writes "If you were a kid in the late 70's or 80's chances are you owned a Rubik's cube. BBC News takes a look at the people who never lost the passion for the puzzle toy and those just learning. 'The speed world record for a single attempt is 5.55 seconds, set by Dutchman Mats Valk last year. The world championship is determined by averaging three attempts. The current champion is 18-year-old Australian Feliks Zemdeg who averaged 8.18 seconds last year. To ensure fairness, a computer generates a randomised cube which all the competitors are given. The record for most Rubik's cubes solved in 24 hours is 4,786, set by Milán Baticz of Hungary.'"
Is that a fat guy with really skinny arms, or does he just have garbage posture?
who still watch Star Trek..I mean addicted to Star Trek.
I solved one, proudly put it on my shelf, and 3 days later someone one was on the news using a pattern to solve it.
Although my memory of the time is screwy. I would have sworn I did it in 78. Oh well, such is age...stupid stupid age.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's like the methadone of cube addiction.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Great point. The image in the background of children starving in Ethiopia because of the Republicans while some idiot Republican in a plaid shirt and Wrangler jeans in the foreground solving a Rubik’s cube is more 1980’s than any other image could possibly be. It shows the stupid things the Republicans celebrate and the horrific things like starving children that they celebrate. Their kind is disgusting.
Solved it back when they first came out in '78.
With a SCREWDRIVER.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
try the Rubik's Tesseract.
Since humans can't actually manipulate 4-D objects (yet), you'll have to settle for a computer simulation. Still fun though.
Came out in 80. :)
I also took one apart. Cause...why wouldn't you?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Rubik's cube was a game a person played when they were high. Holland is full of reefer cafes. Naturally a Dutchman set the record.
No, we have Progressive Liberal administration in power, yet they are also big corporation butt-lickers and continue the Bush/Cheney agenda. More proof your Republican vs. Democrat view is very naive.
3.3 rubiks cubes per minute for 24 straight hours... I am assuming, of course, that the guy pulled an all nighter.
My method takes six steps, tops: http://i.imgur.com/Ot0mJHf.jpg
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Came out in 80.
Came out in 1977 named the Hungarian Magic Cube.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Born in '69 I was the magic age when Rubik's Cubes came out.
I was solving them with ease when the craze was in full frenzy. In the bookstore (those were places in malls that sold books -- malls were places people used to go shopping), next to the video game guides for beating all of the levels of PacMan were guides for solving your cube.
I used to make a couple bucks here and there betting I could do a cube in under 2 minutes -- trivial by any competitive standard (then or now).
Although today I know it's not as efficient strategy as some others, I used a top-down completion method.
Somewhere between the 80's and today, I forgot the pattern that rotates the bottom middle (non-corner) pieces, and I've never seen the exact method I've used displayed anywhere so I could just pick up the forgotten piece of my solving routine without learning a new one. :(
People still play chess, because they like it. I think I'm dumbening because of Slashdot's slow news day articles.
They are not progressive you fucking Republican liar. If your kind was capable of understanding what that word meant, you would never use it to describe those CONservatives. They have not done a single progressive thing since taking over. Not one. All they have done is what their CONservative masters have demanded. Obama is to the right of your hero, that you are too stupid to understand wasn’t like your kind, Raygun. As usual, you people try to make everything about politics because you have no interests outside of repressing people.
World Record
Solved it back when they first came out in '78. With a SCREWDRIVER.
You're a better man than I. After eight screwdrivers I ran out orange juice and threw my cube at the wall, shattering my lava lamp and setting fire to my shag carpeting. I managed to stomp it out, but my elevator shoes and bell bottoms were ruined in the process. The very next day I slicked back my hair, bought a pin-striped suit, and started buying up distressed companies and selling off their assets to fuel my coke addiction.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I was born in '68. Another poster called '69 the "magic age" to be when it came out. Close enough. I was fascinated by the thing, and was able to solve it before the books came out--with a little help from Scientific American. They published an article which included a way to annotate moves on the Cube. More importantly, the article gave me the key insight--think of the individual "cubies" and not "the sides". It seems obvious now; but when presented with a cube you were erroneously lead to regard "getting a side" as progress. Nonsense. You had to get cubies aligned, and then align other cubies without disturbing the previous alignment. Of course I'm glossing over a lot here, and I'm sure the techniques have advanced considerably. Anyway, I was able to get some positive attention for a change by solving it a few months before all the books on how to solve it came out. Yep, people actually bought books on how to solve it. I think I got the thing down to a little under 3 minutes. Then I started doing patterns with it. I could tell when a cube had been made un-solvable. This happened when people switched the stickers. My obsession lasted a little less than a year, then trailed off. I'd solve it "for old times sake" a few years after that. I don't recall exactly where it fit in time. It probably ran concurrently with arcade games and slightly before I got obsessed with flyable model planes...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
what did you need a screwdrivef for ???
Those stickers were easy to peel off with NAILS.
Get a life
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. In September 1979, a deal was signed with Ideal to release the Magic Cube worldwide, and the puzzle made its international debut at the toy fairs of London, Paris, Nuremberg and New York in January and February 1980.
Of course you are a well known liar on slashdot, regardless of how often you create a new account.
I think there are several ways of tackling it:
0) the hard way: learning to solve it in a 'naiive' fashion.
1) learn a basic solve using the basic technique. This can be done in 1 day, if you apply yourself. Not very challenging.
2) learn to speed-solve the cube (e.g. solving in well under 1 minute). TOTALLY different kettle of fish to merely learning to solve. Can take ages (years) to get really fast.
3) use the Rubiks Cube as a motivation to learn some group theory and solve the cube from first principles that way. Bonus: the mathematics has myriad uses elsewhere.
It's naive if you fail to consider everything in your post is wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My old man gave me a cube when I was a kid, and told me that the easiest colour to solve is black ;-)
That said, you don't want to peel the stickers off (you'll just ruin the stickers). Most cubes can be disassembled easily by turning a face 45 degrees, and popping an edge out. The rest of the cube will just fall out. Reassemble in the correct order, and voila -- solved cube.
BTW, if you were to take a cube apart and reassemble it at randon, there's only a 1-in-12 chance of reassembling it into a solved state. With an unsolvable cube, it becomes obvious once you go to orient the final face edges.
It never really held my interest.
I could always find something more interesting to do, like writing D&D or Traveler adventures.
Now if there's something I want to do by myself I can always find some thing.
IIRC, only the knockoffs had stickers. The real Rubik's Cube had the colors painted on.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
TFA says there were no Youtube videos to learn solving methods back in the day. That's true, but there were published solving procedures in book form. I had one when I was around 12 or 13 and after some practice could solve a cube in well under a minute, but it's been so long I can no longer remember the process I used. It worked 100% of the time, though. TFA makes it sound like it was a lot harder to solve in the 80's before the popularization of the Internet, but it wasn't. You just had to buy a book.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
My old man gave me a cube when I was a kid, and told me that the easiest colour to solve is black ;-)
That was the special edition Das Rubik Cube.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
holy fuck, did slashdot get overrun by faggot ass reddit when beta came out or something? you trolls are not even good. Go back to reddit and let the big boys talk
Once you know a beginner's algorithm for solving the cube, it's amazingly easy to do. I was a kid in the 80's and all my life I thought it required serious brains to be able to solve it. Now I know that the guys who figured out how to solve it had brains, but for the rest of use, there are extremely easy algorithms that can be used to do it. In a way, it's taken the mystery out of the puzzle for me.
I taught my son how to solve it when he was 5 (last year). Solving the cube is in fact so easy that a kid can do it.
Being a mathematician, I reduced it to seven successive problems. One evening I got the first problem in my head, slept for one cycle, and woke up with the solution. Then I got the second problem in my head , ... lather, rinse, repeat ... By morning it was solved.
Just shows that the brain works while you are asleep.
Me, I manged to teach myself to get one side solved and oriented, but I never figured out more than that on my own. (Nor felt the need to go look up solutions.)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I used to work with a guy who was a registered republican and could solve one in about 30 seconds. I know people can do it faster, but seeing him do it in front of me was pretty mind-blowing.
Let's not devolve into partisan insult talk, although I agree that the stereotypical herpa derp jesus is my savior and teh gays are evil assholes probably aren't huge math fans.
I never really stopped liking the Rubik's cube. The remarkable thing I've found is the explosion of nxn cubes made by companies other than Rubik's - each with a very different feel (and much better performance).
In my opinion, the Rubik's brand are the worst available - overpriced, and literally painful to use for more than a few twists. Even a cheap $3 knockoff is a vastly superior mechanical design.
Modern speedcubes (non-Rubik's) are a lot more fun: your hands aren't hurting because the cube is painfully stiff or constantly locking up because of a tiny misalignment. The stickers don't peel up from a few minute's use... And they still cost less than the Rubik's brand.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Call me an addict, rarely a day passes without a couple of solves. I now own cubes from 2x2x2 up to 5x5x5. I will never be near the record solving times however I like it. So not everyone is "still" an addict, some just got in. For me at age 31.
Oh yes, the True Scotsman theory. Mao, Lenin, Stalin et. al weren't really communists, they just hijacked the term. Communism has yet to fail because it has yet to be implemented.
I guess I can also claim that a free market has yet to fail to solve the worlds problems because we have never seen a truly free market. Capitalism cannot have been shown to fail because it has never actually been implemented.
At least we can agree on these, I guess.
So the starting configurations for setting the Rubik's cube record are random. If I wait long enough, the starting configurations will randomly be the identity transformation, and I can solve the cube in 0 seconds. Therefore, in the infinite-time limit, I am the Rubik's cube champion with an unbeatable time. QED
Sounds like a good way to stump those "speed cubists."
How is the boneitis?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
That only works in 3 dimensions unfortunately:
http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.htm
I don't know what magnets you're talking about, but the one I had was just plastic pieces and could easily be taken apart with a screwdriver.. you gently twist a flathead screwdriver between two pieces, and twist.. Then you can easily pull that piece off. After you take a few off, the rest can pull out with no more screwdriver.
Blue Horseshoe, buddy, how you been?
I've been doing several to dozens of solves daily for the last several years. I couldn't average much faster than 40 seconds no matter how much a studied and practiced. A few months ago I threw away all of my cubes (around 10 of them) so that I could stop obsessing over it. I was wasting so much of my life sitting there solving over and over.
Sorry, but if you didn't use your bare hands, then you were cheating. It was admittedly a lot easier with a cube that had been broken in, new ones could be a bit hard to pop the first piece off. Twisting one layer slightly out of alignment, then making a perpendicular turn allowed you to get your little finger into a gap, which you could then use to lever a piece off. On well used cubes, just the perpendicular turn with the layers out of alignment was enough to make the whole cube fall apart.
Though from other replies, maybe mine was a ripoff. I seem to remember mine having stickers, other replies said the sticker ones weren't true Rubik's Cubes.
All the officially licensed ones I've seen had stickers. I'm assuming here that the "real" painted ones are the 1977 Hungarian original, not the 1980 globally mass produced re-release.
You do not RC. The real Rubik's cube has always used stickers. Only recently have Rubik's started manufacturing cubes with coloured plastic sides.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Yet another 1 line no substance fart of a reply from gmhowell!