Glasgow, Scotland, UK • November 2012 • Length of Read: 1 Minute
The Rubik’s cube originated in Hungary in 1977 as the ‘Magic Cube’, but not until a name change to that of its inventor in 1980 did it become an international success. It is now the best selling puzzle game of all time and was also the puzzle that plagued me as a child; causing numerous frustrated tantrums. The closest I got to ever finishing it was peeling the stickers off and replacing them on the correct sides, and was determined to redeem my younger self by conquering this little piece of plastic once and for all. To complete this challenge I would have to use logic and algorithms; thankfully the internet was there to answer my call and lend a helping hand.
I purchased a brand new cube from Amazon and breaking open the packaging on its arrival immediately went to Youtube for a lesson or two. Here I stumbled across Dan Brown (unfortunately not the author of the Da Vinci Code) who has amassed over 40 million views from his ‘how to solve a Rubik’s cube’ tutorials. With this step by step guide and the Solutions manual from the official Rubik’s Cube website it took me only a couple of hours to unscramble a whole childhood of anger.
However I felt somewhat unfulfilled from this experience. After all, the game is designed to test your logic and by following the tutorial felt like sitting an exam having seen the answers. I can now tick this off my list, but lure of the puzzle and the satisfaction of it’s completion have unfortunately been lost.