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When I thought about the Cube, a vision of Erno Rubik’s most famous creation emerged obligingly from the smoke rings of my memory. It was almost colour-coordinated, with just two cubelets on the edge being out of alignment. That off-colour pair was the formation I struggled with, while travelling by train from Madurai to Calcutta in 1981. I had solved the rest of the cube before I boarded the train for the day journey from Madurai to Madras. Then I changed trains at Madras, for Calcutta, a trip which took two nights with a day sandwiched in between. That second night on the Howrah Mail, I solved the pair. I would have danced a jig if that 3-tier compartment had been less crowded.
I had found a very inefficient solution and taken an inordinately long time as well. There were ways to shorten the entire process drastically. There were kids in their early teens or younger who could take an utterly scrambled cube and rip out a perfect solution in less than a minute.
Cubemania took over the world or at least, the geeky bits of it that I interacted with, for a couple of years in the '80s. Everyone was trying to solve the cube or to solve it more efficiently. We tried different ways and shared our insights. We invented funny notations. Many of us took apart the cheap tacky pirated things that were the best we could afford and greased the innards of the mechanism with vaseline. Lubed cubes definitely worked better.
Cubemania sometimes affected personal lives in strange ways. It helped regulate my smoking habit for a while just because I didn’t have a hand to spare. People would hang around college campuses doing the cube and radiating the come hither at attractive members of the opposite sex.
We all heard garbled versions of the urban legend about the Hungarian inventor who did not receive a single forint for his invention. That turned out to be an extremely nuanced version of the truth. One puzzling little detail — that there were many solutions already floating around — only made sense much later.
The cube is 40 years old now but nobody outside of a magic circle of Rubik’s students and friends saw it before 1976. The first Hungarian cubes bounced around for several years until a German company bought the rights. It started being marketed globally only in the early 1980s.
It took a while for stuff to filter out from behind the Iron Curtain those days, and by the time it went global, the “commies” had already found ways to solve it. Rubik did get some money for it and, of course, he received eternal fame. He has made multiple puzzles in the last four decades and inspired many more puzzles as well. The latest is the Rubik 360. This is a transparent sphere, containing smaller spheres and coloured balls, which can be rolled into spheres of specific colours.
It’s estimated that over 350 million cubes have been sold. It could well be the most popular toy of all time. Rubik took over a month to solve his own puzzle and he wasn’t sure there was a solution until he worked it out.
An architect and a professor, he had invented the cube in order to demonstrate the ingenuous nature of the inner mechanism. The mechanism allows each face to rotate independently with six fixed central cubes keeping the orientation of the faces stable. A cube contains six fixed central cubelets, eight corners with three colours each and 12 edges with two colours each.
Since Rubik’s day, the materials used have improved and modern “speed cubes” can be solved inside of seven seconds. The solving algorithms have also improved and YouTube reduces the need for complex notation. The cube continues to exercise its fascination. World cubing championships are held regularly.
The toy is a demonstration of applied group theory. The cubelets can be “legally” arranged in more than 43 quintillion ways (43 followed by 18 zeros). It can be arranged in many more ways with no possible solutions. Even these numbers are dwarfed by the possible permutations of the 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 variants. A shipwrecked mariner on a desert island could be entertained until the end of his days if he happened to lay his hands on one of those.
