Big News for Mr. Rubik's Magic Cube

via Wikipedia

Children and adults alive in the 80s remember the Rubik’s Cube as that multi-colored, frustrating puzzle that much of the world was obsessed with solving. Everyone across the globe seemed to have one. While it felt like a mere fad at the time, fascination with the ‘magic cube’ has endured, and is still enjoyed by generations of people who thrill to the challenge it poses. Indeed, read on to discover that there was big news in the world of competitive 'speedcubing' in the past few months.

Wouldn't you just know that that the famous mind-bending puzzle was invented by a Hungarian? His name was Ernő Rubik. It was one of those fairy-tale inventions: created in hours off from work as a university professor by a man with a passion for math, design, and games. The first Cube prototype was actually made of wood, with beveled corners, and the object was to match designs rather than colors. Initially called the ‘Magic Cube’ by the humble Rubik, the toy company that bought the rights re-named it Rubik’s Cube.

To call the Cube a phenomenon would be an understatement. More than 300,000,000 cubes have been sold since its introduction, and if laid next to each other, would form a line from the North to the South Pole. The toy company estimates that at the height of its success, one fifth of the world’s population had tried their hand at the Cube.

It also happened that last September, a new world record was set in solving the Cube at a speedcubing competition. The winner, Patrick Ponce, a teenager from the United Stated, was recorded as having completed to puzzle in an astonishing 4.69 seconds. This record as subsequently broken by Korean SeungBeom Cho who  with a 4.59 second finish. It has been a very exciting year for the Cube indeed. These aren’t just kids fiddling around in their basements. There is a worldwide culture of Cubing competitions, and the Guinness Book of World Records tracks and publishes the results. But traditional speedcubing isn’t the only way people compete with the Cube. There are also events for solving the puzzle with your feet, solving it underwater, blindfolded, or solving the cube in the fewest moves.

The puzzle, like a deck of cards or game of chess, seems to be built for the ages, as it shows no signs of fading in popularity. “I made something I found interesting and my idea was, ‘It’s good, and I wanted to share it with other people,’ ” said Rubik, now over 70, speaking at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA. “I was not thinking about the size of the popularity and that kind of thing. It’s happened because of the cube, not because of me.”

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