Chapter XCVIII: Cubed

Image of the Day: My Roommate's a Loser

A couple of days before Winter Break, my roommate bought a Rubik's Cube from K-Mart. The little fucker was extraordinarily difficult to come by, being sold out at Wal-Mart and costing upwards of eleven bucks. Darron and I naturally refused to look at the accompanying instructions and attempted to replicate, in our living room, fifty years of research by mathematicians and Asian child prodigies.

This didn't really pan out (who woulda guessed?), and inspired the Image of the Day. Conceding defeat, we read the printed instructions, which turned out to be quite useless. They tell you how to solve the Cube, but only after you've already gotten it into a specific configuration which they call "The Green Cross." The explanation for how to reach this beginning step is: You will have to figure this out for yourself. Gee, thanks for nothing, Mr. Rubik.

So I went online and found a java applet where you can enter the configuration of your Cube and it'll tell you all the steps you need to solve it. I placed the completed Cube on the living room table, and the next morning Darron thought I was Rubik's Cube Jesus!

Interesting Rubik's Cube Facts:
1. Erno Rubik, the inventor of the cube, was a professor of Architecture.
2. There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 Rubik's Cube configurations.
3. None of these is more than twenty moves away from being solved.
4. The official world record for speed cubing is held by Minh Thai (22.95 seconds).

I also found is the following YouTube video of a Canadian kid solving the Cube in a minute or so. He has a cute smile when he finishes.


He also plays with his cat.