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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.'"
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?"
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
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.
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. :(
While not a cube addict, I am a Numberphile junkie, and they have several cube-related videos. The Rubik's Cube is pretty interesting from the point of view of abstract algebra: a large but finite set of values and an interesting set of operators - very different from + and *. It's a neat example of algebra that's not an obvious analog to numbers, but that you can wrap your head (and hands) around.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think you're mistaking the back of his chair as being part of his torso. It's just a really skinny young guy with unkempt hair. I used to be skinny like that as well until middle age hit me like a freight train. Now I look like a freight train.
Mostly random stuff.
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"?
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.
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.
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"!
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.
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.
Try to solve it again, then come to grips with how much smarter you were then.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The math/group theory of the puzzle is very neat... However what amazes me even more is the physical deign: if you came with the "overall concept" of this puzzle, nearly all mechanical engineers would tell you it is impossible to construct a mechanical gadget (physical object) which would be able to rotate layers in three perpendicular directions without felling apart. Truly marvelous piece of engineering...
How is the boneitis?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon