Rubik's Cube: 40 Years Old and Never Meant To Be a Toy

An anonymous reader writes "The greatest geek toy ever invented turns 40 today and to celebrate there's an interactive Google Doodle, and the Telegraph has a short history of the toy. 'There are only a handful of toys that last more than a generation. But the Rubik's cube, which celebrates its 40th birthday, now joins the likes of Barbie, Play-Doh, Lego and the Slinky, as one of the great survivors in the toy cupboard. What makes its success all the remarkable is that it did not start out as a toy. The Rubik's cube was invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian architect, who wanted a working model to help explain three-dimensional geometry.'"

Re:40 years and I still can't solve it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is easy: remove all the coloured stickers from each cube face, and you get a cube with each face having a uniform colour.

Re:40 years and I still can't solve it

[LocutusOfBorg1]

This is easy: remove all the coloured stickers from each cube face, and you get a cube with each face having a uniform colour.

I did exactly this when I received my first cube. Still not able to solve it :)

Re:40 years and I still can't solve it

[umafuckit]

Then learn! RubiksPlace [rubiksplace.com] has one of the better tutorials on the net. Good cubes can be purchased for under $15. Buy one by Dayan, or a similar company. The official Rubik's ones mostly suck. Follow the instructions on the site and you'll have a solve within half an hour. Then you can proceed onto learning and understanding the process. It's rather fun. I've just started and my goal for this year to get a sub one minute solve. I'm busy, so if I can nail that I'll be very happy.

Re:Hajrá Magyarország!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it means in English "Go Hungarians!".

Re:Hmm

[tkuCheck]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]: "Although it is widely reported that the Cube was built as a teaching tool to help his students understand 3D objects, his actual purpose was solving the structural problem of moving the parts independently without the entire mechanism falling apart. He did not realize that he had created a puzzle until the first time he scrambled his new Cube and then tried to restore it."

Re:4 d version?

[umafuckit]

This [superliminal.com] is the closest you're likely to get to a 4-D Rubik's cube.

Re:40 years and I still can't solve it

[LostOne]

If one edge piece is flipped as described, the cube does, in fact, become unsolvable. It is not possible to flip a single edge piece without affecting at least one other piece on the cube.

Bad link in summary

[mgemmons]

You would expect that a link named "an interactive google doodle" would link to, you know, that and not an engadget article which has a decidedly non-interactive screenshot of said doodle . But hey, this is slashdot. Go here instead: http://www.google.com/doodles/ [google.com]