Back in 1974, a Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture named Erno Rubik invented a 3-D puzzle which he originally called the Magic Cube. Rubik licensed the cube to Ideal Toy Corp and, by 2009, over 350 million Rubik's Cubes had been sold. It has now become the world's best-selling toy.
You can still find Rubik's Cubes for sale in places like Barnes & Noble Booksellers, so any kid or grownup who wants to challenge himself to solve the puzzle is still welcome to try. There are many variations on the original theme, and you can even find an Aggies Cube which has the same color on every side. I once owned an Aggies Cube, but I made it impossible to solve, at least for me, by drawing arrows on all the little squares. The center squares rotate and I was never able to get them all lined up again. But I see I am getting ahead of myself.
My exposure to a Rubik's Cube came way back in 1980 down in Lake Providence, La., as I sat in an unemployment office with a roomful of others who were waiting to fill out their paperwork. My regular job was of the sort that, once the winter rains came, I wouldn't be able to do any work for a few months, so drawing unemployment during the winter was just part of the process. As I sat there, my eye went to a young black man who held a cube in his hand and was randomly rotating it this way and that. All the while he turned the cube he kept muttering to himself, "I'm gone to work this thing! I'm gone to work this thing!" He seemed quite perturbed as he rotated the different facets of the cube, but I didn't see any evidence of the cube getting solved. I did, however, take an instant interest in the cube itself and made a mental note to buy one for myself.
So the day came when I bought my own Rubik's Cube and, in order to avoid the random turning I had witnessed at the unemployment office, I decided I needed to possess some sort of strategy as I approached solving the cube. The object of solving the cube, of course, is to get each side with its own color so that every side is a solid color. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, let me tell you why it isn't so simple in practice. The cube rotates in various directions and has an enormous number of possible combinations. When I say "enormous" I mean really big, like in the neighborhood of over 43 quintillion possible combinations. And, in case you forgot, that's a 43 followed by 18 zeroes! So randomly turning the different faces of the cube will never get you to a solution. In fact, a solution requires a very methodical approach.
After much trial and error, I realized that working the cube by layers seemed to offer some promise, so I began working what I called the bottom layer and then the middle layer, and that left only the top layer to be solved. But solving that top layer proved to be a challenge for me. And one wrong move destroyed all the work that had been done on the first two layers. I began to realize that the top layer had to be broken down into edge pieces and corner pieces and that either edge pieces had to be solved first or else corner pieces, but it wasn't practical to try and solve both together, at least not for me. After that, things fell into place for me and I was able to solve the puzzle. Reading how others approached its solution helped as well. I once made extensive drawings and notes so that anyone could use my method of solving the cube, but I would be hard pressed to find them now.
I know there are really smart people who actually solve several squares simultaneously, but I am not in that class. That's why I have never been able to solve the Rubik's Cube in less than 2½ minutes even though the world record is somewhere around 9 or 10 seconds. These geniuses are solving whole sections of the cube at once rather than one square at a time. But the biggest lesson from working the Rubik's Cube was to not give up on something even though it may be hard. Perseverance is the key. This has often been a source of encouragement to me in all areas of my life.
Sam Byrnes is a Gentry-area resident and weekly contributor to the Eagle Observer. He may be contacted by email at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 09/19/2018