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Rubik's Cube: 40 Years Old and Never Meant To Be a Toy
An anonymous reader writes "The greatest geek toy ever invented turns 40 today and to celebrate there's an interactive Google Doodle, and the Telegraph has a short history of the toy. 'There are only a handful of toys that last more than a generation. But the Rubik's cube, which celebrates its 40th birthday, now joins the likes of Barbie, Play-Doh, Lego and the Slinky, as one of the great survivors in the toy cupboard. What makes its success all the remarkable is that it did not start out as a toy. The Rubik's cube was invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian architect, who wanted a working model to help explain three-dimensional geometry.'"
Hajrá Magyarok!
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Never did learn how to solve it.
You used to see them everywhere, not really the case for the last decade or two.
You cannot compare the Rubik's cube to Barbie or Play-Doh on that front.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
[...] The Rubik's cube, which celebrates its 40th birthday, now joins the likes of Barbie, Play-Doh, Lego, and the Slinky as one of the great survivors in the toy cupboard.
One of these things is not like the others.
Never doesn't mean initially.
I think you mean "Initially not meant to be a toy".
Nem hiszem éz nem Lófütyi!
(Horses are prevalent in Hungarian language)
The Rubik's cube was invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian architect, who wanted a working model to help explain three-dimensional geometry.
That explains why it can be solved mathematically. While a lot of puzzles have a fixed "solution" sheet which comes with the puzzle, the Rubik's cube requires a procedure.
It feels more like: "Hey, we got paid some dough to mention Ed Miliband in the wake of the European Elections, is there any way we can plug him without people catching on?" And since he said something about a Rubik Cube...
I can't say I think of it as the greatest geek toy. Cool puzzle, but not geek toy. When I think of a great geek toy, I think of something that demonstrates some physical property (like a gyroscope, or one of those glass tubes with a colored liquid that boils when you hold it in your hand), or something like a Mindstorms set where you can explore computing and robotics.
The Google Doodle of this tells me to play I must have the latest version of Chrome/Safari/Firefox. However I do have the latest version of Chrome! Version 34.0.1847.137 so it tells me. (At least I think it's the latest version, I've not been able to find anything on Google that tells me what is the official latest version).
Bah.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Too bad you can't peel off the stickers like I did to annoy friends of mine back in the early 80's that would never put those things down. Was fun to watch them try to figure out why they could never match the sides when two stickers were in the wrong spot.
The Rubik's cube was invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian architect, who wanted a working model to help explain three-dimensional geometry.
I've heard this before but it makes no sense to me that the cube would in any way help to explain three dimensional geometry (any more than would a static cube of wood). Can anyone elucidate on this?
Not that I'm complaining. Love to play with one myself.
I'm colorblind, you insensitive clod!
Did he ever make a 4 dimensional version (Rubik's Tesseract)
'There are only a handful of toys that last more than a generation.
Oh, come on, there are many 'toys' that have been around for more than a century
Like the 'stick with the horses head handle, the bicycle and tricycle, the spinning top, the soccer ball, the oval football, the bucket and spade (sandcastles) the swimming pool, the Y shaped catapult, dolls (and toy soldiers for boys) chalk, crayons and other drawing stuff, the seesaw (aka teeter tottor) slides, playing cards (the classical 4 suits kind) dice (6 sided, not the crappy company that owns slashdot, the skipping rope, the kaleidoscope, the boomerang, model trains, cars and boats, and the box that the toys came in
That's good, because it was never actually any fun anyway.
I can solve a 5x5x5 rubik's cube in 10 minutes. How about you?
Can you hammer a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?
I am not a crackpot.
A girl's gotta have standards.
You would expect that a link named "an interactive google doodle" would link to, you know, that and not an engadget article which has a decidedly non-interactive screenshot of said doodle . But hey, this is slashdot. Go here instead: http://www.google.com/doodles/
Child culture doesn't change much over the years. Look at your list and think about how many of them have been in existence for over 100 years or even 500. Many of them can be traced back to the dark ages or even further. Managing to insert your toy into part of child culture is an accomplishment worth noting; to me it remains to be seen if Rubik's cube has actually managed to do so (despite being a fan, I suspect the answer is no).
About the same, maybe a few minutes longer, but I did figure it out the solution myself. How about you?
My daughter is in a 5th-grade class of what we used to call "gifted students". This year, it's the hot thing. Virtually everyone in the class can solve a 3x3. Almost everyone has 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, mirrored cubes, odd shaped cubes, void cubes, etc. They speed cube. They buy ones that turn better with their allowances. When I think of all the stupid things they could be into, like Justin Bieber, it gives me faith in the future.
I'm pretty sure catapults (slingshots) and toy soldiers are considered WMDs under current public school zero-tolerance policies.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Would it help you to understand what's going on if you considered a 2x2x2 cube first? I was thinking the solution involves group theory and perhaps rotation matrices....
Remember it doesn't matter that a Hungarian guy invented it. Some kid in Korea is the best at it. That's all that matters.....It's not about innovation anymore. It's patent infringing Chinese and Korean knockoffs and is not about the creativity of inventing the toy, it's the ordinary methodical procedure at solving it over and over again so its almost impossible not to be good at it...
Great movie reference :)
See if you can find the old Scientific American cover story about RK. It describes in particular how the algorithms used to solve the cube are derived from partial differential equations that identify permitted states and permitted transitions between states of certain sub-atomic particles. It's been a long time, but it kind of sticks in my head that the 3x3x3 cube may assume states analogous to the permitted electron energy levels of some mid-Periodic Table element. So it really does illustrate a principle of physics.
If anybody can find more about that source, I'd be interested. I still have the original cellulose-based magazine on my bookshelf somewhere, but it'd take me quite a while to find it.
Follow-up: Apparently that SA article I just mentioned is from a 1981 or 1982 issue. And, in the suggested solution, the authors noted that the cube can be solved by applying "operators" -- similar to those that infest quantum mechanics -- that each perform a specific function, such as exchanging two positions or rotating three positions clockwise. In particle physics, each operator might exchange two or three parameters of a particle's state in an analogous way to the manner in which the equivalent operator would change the configurations of the Cube's face.
The ultimate physics toy.