Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Puzzling matters

Did you know that five different people have patents to the "Puzzle with Pieces Rotatable in Groups"? Hmmm. It seems that everything can stand for a little improvement.

Did you also know that there are 43,252,003,274, 489,856,000 different ways to position the sides (without taking it apart)? To put this into perspective, if every permutation of a 57 millimeter Rubik's Cube were lined up end to end, it would stretch out approximately 261 light years.

Despite the vast number of positions, all Cubes can be solved in twenty-five or fewer moves! It is said to be the world's best-selling toy, with over 300,000,000 Rubik's Cubes being sold worldwide to date.

Let's see... I paid about $10 for mine. Um, let's say that we average the price, since it was first sold in 1980 by Ideal Toy company, to, say $7, this would equal gross sales of $2,100,000,000. This is over 2 Trillion Dollars!

And I can solve it in 2 minutes. Yes, I'm a genius. And a superhero. I wish I was an inventor too.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is great! Very informative. You're super!