soma cube

Soma Puzzle comprises a set of seven pieces. The objective of the game is to assemble them together to make various figures. The simplest figure that employs all seven pieces is a cube.

For the history of soma cubes click...

How to play? If no pieces are selected you can rotate the playing field by pressing left mouse button and moving the mouse in the desired direction. 
To select a piece, click on it. Holding left mouse button you can drag the selected piece in the desired direction. The red arrow shows the direction it will move in. 
Double-clicking on a piece activates rotation mode. In rotation mode red arrows appear around the piece. Clicking on an arrow rotates the piece in the shown direction.

It’s time to try and build the Soma Cube. It has been proven that there are 240 essentially different ways to form the cube using seven Soma pieces (this does not count rotations and reflections, so you cannot just turn the cube and consider it to be another solution).

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history of soma cubes

Soma (Sanskrit) — an euphoric plant extraction, used in ancient India as a drug. Soma-addicts forgot time and place. The name for the puzzle, however, was taken from Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘A Brave New World’. In this novel Soma was an addictive drug taken by people when they were neither distracted nor busy. Soma puzzle is not a drug, it’s a game that can provide you hours of fun and exploration, a good way to learn visualizing geometric shapes but still — be forewarned — it’s very addictive!

The Soma Cube discoverer, Piet Hein, a Danish poet and scientist, first envisioned the seven Soma pieces in 1936, during a lecture on Quantum physics. He visualized the set of all irregular shapes formed by no more than 4 cubes, all the same size and joined at their faces. ‘Irregular’ means that in such a figure you can join two points on the figure with a line which lies outside the figure. Thus, a figure formed by two, three or four cubes joined in a line is not irregular. These seven cubes are shown below:

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After he visualized the shapes, Mr. Hein understood that they could be combined to a larger cube of the dimensions 3x3x3. Later that day he made the seven shapes and tested the idea in practice. Then he began working with various figures managing to create many very impressive structures. It was soon thereafter noticed by the author and his followers that the act of arranging pieces into figures became very fun, yet, however, very addicting.

Later the puzzle was popularized by Martin Gardner, the Mathematical Games columnist for Scientific American. Later he wrote: “I only figured that only a few readers would take the trouble of making their own set of Soma shapes. But I was wrong. Thousands of readers mailed me drawings of new Soma models, and many claimed they no longer had any spare time, after they were caught by the Soma. The charm of Soma is, for a large part, I would think, that one only uses seven shapes. One is not overwhelmed by a complicated material.”

Psychologists started using Soma at their tests and they showed that the capability to solve Soma puzzles is correlated with general intelligence (though there are geniuses that find it difficult to solve the puzzle but some mentally handicapped persons seem to have a special gift of spatial imagination). In any event, people who have participated in these tests, have insisted on continuing playing with the cubes; the variety of interesting structures seems to be endless.