English: DID YOU KNOW!!!!

There are an incredible 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different ways that Rubik’s Cube can be arranged. But just one of those combinations is the correct solution to the puzzle

The Rubik’s Cube is the most popular puzzle ever made — and still holds the same appeal as it did back in 1974 when it was first created. For those who don’t know (and there can’t be very many of you), the aim of a Rubik’s Cube is to arrange it from a shuffled position so that each side only contains squares of a single color. There are a mind-boggling 43,252,003,274, 489,856,000 (that’s 43 quintillion) ways that the squares on a standard 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube can be arranged. Despite that, the current record for completing the puzzle from a random arrangement is an astonishing 4.90 seconds, set by Lucas Etter from the United States in November 2015. More than 350 million cubes have been sold since the puzzle was first created, making it the world’s best-selling puzzle – and toy – of all time. Here’s some more cool facts about Rubik’s Cube…

Rubik’s Cube used to be the Magic Cube The cube was originally called the Magic Cube and invented in 1974 by Ernö Rubik, a sculptor and teacher at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest, Hungary. It was made for architecture students The 3x3x3 mechanical puzzle was originally made out of wood, and was intended to help architecture students to improve their visualization skills. It was not at first conceptualized as a toy or a puzzle. Rubik only though of it as a puzzle after the first time he scrambled the cube. The guy who made it took a month to solve it When Mr Rubik first invented the cube it took him a month to solve the puzzle. It took a few years to license The Hungarian patent of the cube was obtained in 1975, and two years later it was available for the first time in Budapest toy shops. Although an international patent was not possible, the cube was renamed Rubik’s Cube after it’s creator before its internationalization. In 1979, licensed by Rubik and commercialized by the Ideal Toy Corp, the toy was debuted worldwide. Even the corners can be arranged 40,000 ways The original Rubik’s Cube measures 5.7 cm (2.25 inches) and there are 40,320 ways to arrange the corner pieces, with the aforementioned 43 quintillion possibilities to arrange the pieces overall. In the 80s, 1 in 5 people had played it It soon became the world’s top-selling puzzle of all time and in the mid eighties, the toy’s success was so astonishing that it was estimated that about one fifth of the world’s population had played with it. There’s a 17x17x17 version There are many variations and adaptations of the cube: there are 2x2x2 cubes, 4x4x4 cubes, 5x5x5 cubes, 6x6x6 cubes, 7x7x7 cubes, pocket cubes, keychain cubes, edible cubes, electronic cubes, tactile cubes, MP3 playing cubes, among others. There is a Rubik’s cube inspired art movement: “Rubikubism”, that uses the cubes to create art. And there’s even a 17x17x17 version, which took record-holder Kenneth Brandon 7.5 hours to solve. The first record was 38 seconds After its release the interest in the cube soon was transformed in competition, and in 1981, the Guinness Book of World Records introduced the concept of “Speedcubing”, establishing a record of 38 seconds to solve the puzzle. Today’s record, as we revealed above, is an amazing 4.90 seconds. There are also other variation in competitions that include blindfolding participants, having the puzzle solved with one hand, or even underwater solving. There are strategies behind solving it There are some known strategies to solve the puzzle, one of the most common ones is the “layer by layer” — starting to solve the puzzle from the first layer to the last. Another popular method is the corners method, that consists in arranging the corners of the cube first. It’s possible to solve it in 20 moves From the beginning of the eighties, mathematic and computational researchers have been trying to establish the minimum amount of moves that would be necessary for an optimal solution of the cube. One of the first attempts to solve the problem was addressed by Singmaster and Frey in 1982, who established that it would take a number of moves in the “low twenties”.

In July 2010, a team of researchers working with Google proved that it was possible to optimally solve the puzzle in only 20 moves, definitively solving this question.