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Rubik's Cube is the incredibly addictive multi-dimensional challenge that has fascinated puzzle fans around the world. With a few turns you mix up it's small colored cubes. Now match the cubes back up to make every side a solid color. Once you start turning, twisting and flipping, it's easy to mix up the colors. Not to worry - Rubik's Cube can be set right from any mixed-up combination.
For a brief history of the rubik cube click.....
You want to solve the cube? See these hints then...
The easiest way to solve Rubik's Cube is layer by layer, starting at the
top. It is very difficult to solve face by face, and with billions of
combinations, nearly impossible to solve by trial and error.
Always hold Rubik's Cube in the same orientation while completing a layer.
Remember the colors of the top centre cube and centre cube facing you.
Opposite colours never appear on the same cube pieces. For example, no cube
piece will have BLUE and WHITE, which are opposites, in its color scheme.
Rubik's Cube is solved using quarter twists. You can twist clockwise, by
turning to the right, or counterclockwise, by turning to the left. Whenever
you twist a layer out of position, perform the opposite move if you want to
twist it back into position.
Sometimes you'll perform a series of twists to get a single cube into
position. Doing that will often get other cubes out of position. Repeat the
series of twists to restore the cube.
Think in mirror images when positioning edge cubes. 2 quarter-twists of 2
touching faces turn the an upside-down edge cube the right way up.
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Every invention has an official birth date. For the Cube
this date is 1974 when the first working prototype came into being
and a patent application was initially drafted. The place was Budapest,
the capital of Hungary. The inventor's name is now a household word. At the
time, Erno Rubik was a lecturer at the Department of Interior Design
at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest.
Although 1974 marks the inauguration of the Cube, the processes that led to
the invention began a few years earlier. Nor was the identity of the
inventor a fortuitous accident. Erno Rubik had a passionate interest in
geometry, in the study of 3D forms, in construction and in exploring the
hidden possibilities of combination of forms and materials, not just in
theory, but also in practice.
In the course of his teaching, Erno Rubik preferred to communicate his ideas
by the use of actual models, made from paper, cardboard, wood or
plastic, challenging his students to experiment by manipulating clearly
constructed and easily interpreted forms. It was the realization that even
the simplest elements, cleverly duplicated and manipulated, yield an
abundance of multiple forms that was the first step on the long road that
led finally to the Cube.
Although possible the most original of all invented puzzles, the Cube was
not born in a vacuum. Its classical antecedents are great puzzles in
their own right. The Tangram, originating from ancient China, merely
consists of 5 triangles, a square and a parallelogram, yet so rich in
interesting figures. The pentomino, invented by Solomon W Golomb, has
12 different elements, each one made up of five squares joined together,
displaying all the possible configurations of the five combined squares.
Pentomino poses fascinating geometric problems of constructing various
rectangles. Piet Hein's Soma Cube is, in a sense, a three dimensional
version of Pentominoes. It resembles Rubik's Cube both in shape and in the
large number of ways its seven elements can be assembled into a 3x3x3 cube.
Finally, there is Sam Lloyd's well known 15 puzzle, with it's numbered
tiles locked together yet moving separately, so that by pushing them about
they can be set in sequential order and scrambled at will. Viewing these
puzzles places Rubik's Cube in a context and highlights just what a
breakthrough creations the Cube really is.
What Erno Rubik's is set out to do was to create a three dimensional
object, of a high aesthetic value, which was not only richer in
configuration variations and more of a mental challenge than any puzzle in
existence, but also one which would continue to be ONE, SELF-CONTAINED
WHOLE, all through its manifold transformations.
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This objective seemed at first impossible to achieve. As impossible as the
3-axial rotation of the Cube appears on the first encounter. After
conceiving the idea of the 3x3x3 Cube, Erno Rubik first tried to hold
together the elements of a simpler, 2x2x2 cube, by means an elastic rubber
construction which threaded its way through all 8 elements. Even at this
simple level it soon became clear that such a device could not work. The
alternatives then available, such as magnets and the obvious tongue and
grooves system, could not cope with the complexity of the different
junctions and movements that each element required. Erno Rubik realized that
only a totally original conception could provide a satisfactory solution.
The inspiration came on a lazy, summer day as he was watching the
Danube flow by. On the bank his eyes rested on some pebbles, whose
sharp edges have been rubbed and smoothed away in the course of time brining
into being rounded shapes of great but simple beauty. The interior of the
Cube elements had to have the same rounded architecture. The brilliant interior
mechanism, which is basically cylindrical, took some time to reach its
final form. For ease of manipulation, the balance between tightness and
looseness had to be just right, tolerances had to be exact. Finally, the 54
outer surfaces of the individual elements were given their colours. Lots of
different decorative patterns, with numbers, symbols as well as
diverse colour combinations were tried, but none of them worked nearly as
well as the six simple but distinct colours, each one unifying
and differentiating one single face of the Cube.
When the Cube was complete, Erno Rubik demonstrated it to his
students and let some of his friends play with it. The effect was
instantaneous. Once somebody laid his hands on the Cube it was difficult to
get it back!
The compulsive interest of friends and students in the Cube caught
its creator completely by surprise and it was months before any thought was
given to the possibility of producing it on an industrial scale.
Eventually a manufacturer took on the job of tooling up for mass
production and making the puzzle available to the public at large. Given the
inner complexity of the Cube, and the then prevailing economic conditions in
communist Hungary, this was by no means an easy undertaking. It is to the
credit of the two men a the helm of the toy production firm of Politechnika,
President Lehel Takacz and Chief Engineer Ferencz Manczur that they
perceived at once enough merit in the Cube to accept this task. The process
of turning the hand made object into thousands of low cost, mass
manufactured units was slow. It took the best part of three years, but at
last, towards the end of 1977 the first Cubes appeared on the shelves of the
Budapest toyshops.
During 1978, without any promotion or publicity, the Cube began very slowly
to make its way through the hands of fascinated youths into homes,
playgrounds and schools. The word of mouth spread and by the beginning of
1979 there were enthusiastic circles of Cube devotees in various parts of
Hungary.
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With the country being both physically and culturally behind the iron
curtain at the time, the growing popularity of the Cube did not cross
over to the West for quite some time. Not surprisingly, the bridge which
eventually enabled the Cube to cross the divide was built by two men of
Hungarian origin who established their lives in the West.
Dr Tibor Laczi, born in Budapest, educated in Vienna and employed by a major
German computer manufacturer "discovered" the Cube on one of his
frequent business trips to Hungary. He fell in love with it, and sensing its
potential consumer appeal, brought it to the Nurnberg Toy Fair in
February 1979 in hope of finding a potential German toy distributor. He did
not meet with a great deal of success but he did stumble across an
individual who at that point of the Cube's history as destined to make a
crucial difference.
Tom Kremer, a successful toy and game inventor himself, whose mother
language was also Hungarian, ran at the time his own interesting and
licensing company. Seven Towns Ltd., based in London, was widely
respected throughout the international toy industry as a product developer
working not only with its own ideas but also representing professional
inventors from all over the world.
The two men a pact, there and then, to translate the Hungarian success of
the Cube onto the world stage. Dr Ladzi headed back to Hungary to pave the
way with the prevailing Hungarian bureaucracy whilst Tom Kremer set off on a
world tour of toy manufacturers. He was convinced that to realize the Cube's
full commercial potential it had to have the marketing muscle, the
promotional power and distribution network of a major international company.
Unfortunately he found none of the leading players in the field shared his
enthusiasm. Although impressed by the Cube, the general view within the
industry estimated its prospects to be poor. Its "faults" were
numerous: Too difficult and expensive to manufacture, impossible to
demonstrate its fascination on TV, too abstract, too cerebral, too quiet, a
challenge for the esoteric academic mind rather than a puzzle meant for
children, youths and the general public.
Undeterred by the universal rejection, spurred on by his firm belief in the
exceptional quality of the toy, Tom Kremer, now armed with a convincing
marketing plan, continued his search for a viable partner. After many
disappointments, he succeeded in persuading Stewart Sims, Vice President of
Marketing of the Ideal Toy Corporation, to come to Hungary, to see
with his own eyes the Cube in play. It was now September 1979, by which time
the Cube has gained a sufficient degree of popularity to be seen
occasionally in the street, on trams, in the cafes, each time in the hand of
someone turning and twisting and completely absorbed. After five days of
convoluted negotiations between a skeptical American capitalist and an
obstinate communist organization largely ignorant of the operation of a free
market, with Laczi and Kremer holding desperately the two sides together, an
order for one million cubes was signed amidst much handshaking and
great relief all round.
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In the meanwhile, quite independently of these developments, David
Singmaster, an English mathematician, became deeply interested in the
theoretical problems and ramifications raised by the Cube in his own field.
He wrote a newspaper article in June 1979, the first one to appear outside
Hungary, which brought the Cube to the attention of academic circles world
wide and led indirectly to another milestone in its history: an article in Scientific
American, with a cover picture, by Douglas Hotstadter an acknowledged
authority in the field of Recreational Mathematics.
Apart from a small seepage across the Hungarian borders, the Cube made its international
debut at the Toy Fairs of London, Paris, Nurnberg and New York in
January/February, 1980. With Erno Rubik demonstrating his own creation, the
Cube made an immediate impact. The trade buyers were impressed, orders
rolled in. There was just one problem: there were no Cubes! Western
quality standards and packaging norms meant drastic changes in the Hungarian
manufacturing process. This, as any other change under a communist in
regime, was slow in coming. Communication between New York and Budapest,
given the linguistic and cultural differences, despite the frequent
interventions of Tom Kremer, were not easy.
The flow of products from Hungary, began in May 1980. As soon as the Cube
found its way into the hands of consumers it became evident that the initial
order of one million pieces for the first year would not be anywhere
near sufficient to meet the growing demand. From the very beginning it was a
characteristic of the Cube that no matter how fast production increased,
demand grew faster. Contrary to what the leaders of the Toy Industry had
expected, for the next two and a half years the problem was not selling
Cubes but of supplying them. From 1 million the figures started to grow
quickly to 2, to 3, to 5 million and then, in 1981 exploded exponentially.
Production centres had to expand from Hungary to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Costa
Rica and Brazil, taking up the capacities of many separate factories in each
centre.
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The challenge of trying to master the Cube, to be able to restore all
of its six sides to the original colours seemed to have a mesmeric effect on
an amazing variety of individuals right across age, occupation, wealth and
social standing. Grandmothers, bank managers, baseball players, pilots,
librarians, park attendants could be seen working away at their Cubes at any
hour of the day. In restaurants the Cube would feature on tables side by
side with salt and pepper pots, handled with greater frequency than either.
But it was the young, schoolboys and students, who were in the
vanguard of what was fast becoming a massive movement that swept through the
world. They were the ones who proved most adept at solving the puzzle, they
were the ones to form special cubists clubs, to organize competitions, to
suffer from Rubik's wrist playing continuously for hours and days
with an object that simply could not put down.
The difficulty of solving the Cube and the absolute compulsion of trying to
solve it generated over 60 books offering desperately needed help.
They in turn generated more addicts, displaying with evident pride their
newly acquired prowess.
After winning the highest prize for outstanding inventions in Hungary, in
1980 the Cube own top toy awards in Germany, France, Britain and the U.S. by
1981 it entered as an exhibit the hallowed halls of the New York Museum of
Modern Art. The Cube achieved such a universal presence and penetrated so
deeply the fabric of our society that "Rubik's Cube", by 1982 a
household term, became part of the Oxford English Dictionary.
It is difficult to estimate the total number of Cubes sold throughout the
world. In the period of 1980-1982, partly because demand far outstripped
supply, a huge variety of pirate, unauthorized products of inferior quality
came onto the market from opportunistic Taiwanese, Korean and Hong Kong
vendors. Although the Ideal Toy Corporations won a number of court cases in
Holland, Britain, the U.S. and other countries, it was impossible to stem
the tide. It is safe to assume that the figure exceeds 100 million,
it is certain that it was significantly greater than that.
Interestingly, the legal defense of the Cube was never based on the
original patent that applied to Hungary only. It was the "Rubik"
trademark, Erno Rubik's copyright in the object itself and the "passing
off" laws which secured, and continues to these days to secure adequate
protection of the Cube against unauthorized copies in all countries
throughout the world.
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In effect, as the Cube was initially created as a one-off object, with an
inherent artistic merit, the Rubik copyright applies not only to the 3D
object itself but also to any graphic representation of it in print or on
screen, right until 70 years after the creator's death.
Given the extraordinary volumes of sales, both legitimate and illegitimate,
it was inevitable that eventually a saturation point would be reached. The
market in Cubes collapsed, shops and factories remaindered their stocks and
for some time from 1983 onwards the Cube became unavailable. The Ideal Toy
Corp. was bought by CBS and CBS itself got out of toys in 1985.
The toy business being largely a fashion oriented, the industry gave up on
the Cube, considering it a fad, albeit an unprecedented one. Not so Tom
Kremer. He had always considered the Cube as one of the all time great
classic toys, worthy to be placed alongside such permanent fixtures as Monopoly,
Scrabble and Mr. Potato Head. So in 1985 his company, Seven Towns,
acquired all the rights to the "Rubik's Cube". Biding their time,
they re-introduced the Cube, without any hype, very gradually in
selected key markets, beginning in 1991. Compared to the giant waves of the
early eighties, sales were just a trickle in the first few years. However,
in 1995, Oddzon a dynamic Californian based company took over the
distribution of the Cube with dramatic results. In 1996 in the US alone over
300,000 Cubes were sold with the numbers growing in 1997 and 1998. In Japan,
where Tsukuda is still the faithful original Rubik's Cube
distributor, sales have exceeded 100,000 in 1997 and in Britain sales are
heading that way too. The pattern is the same world over. The Cube is
definitely staging a come back.
But now, in its second incarnation, the Cube is part of a family of
puzzles and games which bear the stamp of the genius who created the
greatest three dimensional puzzle the world has ever known.
Erno Rubik has not changed much over the years. Working closely with Seven
Towns, he is still deeply engaged in creating new games and puzzles, and
remains one of the principal beneficiaries of what proved to be a
spectacularly successful invention.
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