His application to the Hungarian Patent Office in 1975 called the cube a “spatial logic toy.” At the time, Hungary was behind the Iron Curtain - it would remain a communist controlled Eastern bloc state until 1989 - and as Rubik writes, the country had “no particular affinity for toy production.”īack then, puzzles were just a small slice of the overall toy market - you could only find them in souvenir and specialty shops - and thinking of a puzzle as a toy was a novel concept. Rubik takes pride in his ability to self-teach, and bristles at the idea that those in authority are in the best position to impart knowledge. His resume includes stints as a professor, architect, designer, editor and, now, writer. Rubik describes Cubed, as the product of a hermit who is “coming out of the shadows.” He refers to himself as a “concrete and intuitive thinker” and an amateur inventor, but like his invention, he defies categorization. Erno Rubik inspires us with what he’s learned in a lifetime of creating, curiosity and discovery. The first book by the reclusive inventor of the world’s most iconic puzzle, the Rubik's Cube. "And I was without any background for that, because I was the first who tried.” It was fiendishly difficult "to find your way back, or to find your target - just to solve it as a combinatorical problem,'' he said.
#CUBETRACTOR ARCHITECT OF THE CUBES FULL#
At the time, he had no idea if his cube could even be put back into place, let alone how fast - and it took him a full month to solve his own puzzle.
#CUBETRACTOR ARCHITECT OF THE CUBES HOW TO#
(He prefers to use “discovered,” rather than “invented” - as if the existence of the object was somehow pre-ordained).Īfter creating the cube, he explained, he was faced with a second challenge: how to solve it. Sitting on the patio of his home in the hills of Budapest, Rubik, now 76, fiddled with a cube as he recalled its "discovery" and accidental success. “Any twist of any face (clockwise 90 degrees, counterclockwise 90 degrees, or 180 degrees) is a group element, and so are arbitrary sequences of such twists,” he later explained by email. The cube struck Hofstadter as “paradoxical,” he said in a phone interview, since it can be used as a tool to teach group theory, or the symmetries of objects. In March 1981, the Cube landed on the cover of Scientific American, where Pulitzer-Prize winning scientist Douglas Hofstadter, author of "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (1979), called it “one of the most amazing things ever invented for teaching mathematical ideas.” Rubik initially believed the cube would appeal to those with science, math, or engineering backgrounds - and was shocked when “it found its way to people whom nobody would ever have thought might be attracted to it,” he writes. And the evolution of the cube - from a three-by-three-by-three shape to larger four-by-four-by-four and five-by-five-by-five ones - offers different complicated mathematical principles of group theory. To master the cube, you must learn a sequence of movements that can be performed in successive order - the subject of several best-selling books as well as online tutorials. To solve the puzzle, you must twist the cubes so that eventually each side returns to its original color: The challenge is the astounding number of potential variations - more than 43 quintillion of them. In its starting state, each side has a uniform color - red, green, yellow, orange, blue, or white.
The book, he said, is about trying to understand its popularity and “why people love it."Īt first glance, the cube seems deceptively simple, featuring nine colored squares on each side. The impact of the cube has been “much more interesting than the cube itself,” Rubik said in an interview with Undark. The cube also inspired numerous artworks and films, and spawned a competitive sport called speedcubing that fills arenas with teenagers racing to complete the puzzle in the shortest amount of time.īut at the start, no one was more stunned about the runaway success of the cube than its creator, as he explains in his new book, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All.
The invention, eventually renamed the Rubik's Cube, would become the most popular puzzle toy in the world, with more than 350 million sold as of 2018. After spending months tinkering with blocks of cubes - made from wood and paper, held by rubber bands, glue, and paper clips - he finally created something he called the “Bűvös kocka," or Magic Cube. I n the spring of 1974, a young Hungarian architect named Ernő Rubik became obsessed with finding a way to model three-dimensional movement to his students.
0 kommentar(er)
