99 Fun Facts About Rubik's Cube

Ernő Rubik built his first working cube in 1974 out of small blocks of which material?

Wood blocks made up the prototype; Rubik was studying how pieces could move independently without the whole thing falling apart, and only realised he had made a puzzle once he had scrambled it.

How long did Rubik take to solve his prototype?

About a month of trial and error: when he scrambled it he did not even know whether it could be put back, because nobody had ever solved one before.

Before it was renamed after its inventor in 1980, what was the Rubik's Cube originally called?

Magic Cube, bűvös kocka in Hungarian, was the name on Rubik's 1975 patent; its American distributor wanted one important change before the 1980 global launch: a new name.

Will Smith's character solves a Rubik's Cube in a taxi to impress a stockbroker in which film?

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) has Chris Gardner solve the cube to impress a Dean Witter manager, which helps win him a place on the firm's internship; he then flees the taxi because he cannot pay the fare.

Which of these names was considered for the cube before 'Rubik's Cube' was chosen?

The Gordian Knot and Inca Gold were among the names considered before the company chose to tie the product to its inventor instead.

Roughly how many Rubik's Cubes had been sold worldwide by 2024?

500 million is the usual round figure. About 100 million sold in the first two years alone, yet by late 1982 The New York Times was already calling the craze dead.

Which toy entered the US National Toy Hall of Fame in 2014 alongside the Rubik's Cube?

Green army men and bubbles made up the class of 2014 with the cube, which had been a losing finalist several times before; Barbie, LEGO and Monopoly were all among the hall's original inductees.

On a standard modern cube, which colour is opposite white?

Yellow faces white on the standard Western layout; early cubes varied, and on the Japanese scheme still used by some solvers blue and yellow trade places, putting blue opposite white.

Which of these is one of the six face colours on a classic Rubik's Cube?

Orange is one of the six. The original cube wore 54 stickers, nine to a face, which chipped and peeled so readily that newer official cubes use coloured plastic tiles instead.

Which unusual way of solving the cube was an official competition event until it was dropped in 2020?

With the feet: after a delegate poll went 58 to 56 against the event, organisers set participation targets that it failed to meet, and it left the official list in 2020.

How were the pieces of Larry Nichols's 2×2×2 cube puzzle, patented in 1972 before Rubik's cube existed, held together?

Magnets held Nichols's eight small cubes together. His employer later sued, and a US appeals court upheld the claim against Rubik's own 2×2×2 in 1986 but cleared the famous 3×3×3 in 1989.

At which city's toy fair in 1979 was the cube spotted by Tom Kremer, the agent who took it worldwide?

Nuremberg is where Kremer, a toy inventor and marketer, saw the cube's potential at once; he then persuaded a big American toymaker to launch it worldwide the following year.

Which whistleblower told journalists they would recognise him in a Hong Kong hotel in 2013 by the Rubik's Cube he carried?

Edward Snowden used the cube as his recognition signal when Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras came to meet him; Greenwald had expected a grizzled veteran and was shocked to find a 29-year-old.

In official competitions a cuber's result is the average of five solves after which of them are discarded?

The fastest and slowest are both dropped, so the result rests on the three middle times: a cuber's best solve of the round does not count towards the average at all, though it is recorded separately.

What do cubers call it when a piece flies out of the puzzle in the middle of a solve?

A pop usually means the cube was tensioned too loosely for fast turning; big cubes with many layers are especially prone to it.

The 1983 cartoon Rubik, the Amazing Cube shared its hour with which arcade character?

Pac-Man headlined The Pac-Man/Rubik, the Amazing Cube Hour; its cube hero, voiced by Ron Palillo, could only come to life when he was solved.

Which branch of mathematics is used to analyse the Rubik's Cube's moves?

Group theory treats each sequence of turns as something that can be combined and undone; the cube itself proved a handy tool for teaching the subject.

In which Canadian city did the World Championship return in 2003, after a gap of 21 years?

Toronto's Ontario Science Centre hosted the first world championship since 1982; it was run before the sport had any governing body, and prompted the founding of one the following year.

Which toymaker, the company behind Paw Patrol, agreed in October 2020 to buy the Rubik's Cube brand?

Spin Master agreed to pay $50 million, adding the cube to a run of revived classics that already included Etch A Sketch and the Aerobie flying disc.

After Rubik's patents expired in 2000, rival cubes built for speed came mainly from companies in which country?

China's cube makers engineered their puzzles for speed, and competitive solvers came to favour them over the official Rubik's brand cube.

Under official rules, what happens if a cube is one turn away from solved when the timer stops?

Two seconds are added to the time, the '+2' penalty; a cube more than one turn from solved counts as a failed attempt, while a face left less than 45 degrees out of line counts as finished.

What sits at the centre of a 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube?

A three-axis core holds the six face centres in place while letting them spin, so the cube has only 26 visible pieces, and the 20 that are not centres simply clip in around it.

Which pieces of a 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube show three colours each?

Corners sit where three faces meet, so each shows three colours; there are eight of them, against twelve two-coloured edges and six single-coloured centres.

Approximately how many possible arrangements does a 3×3×3 cube have?

43 quintillion is so many that a solver trying one new arrangement every second would need over a trillion years to see them all; the exact figure is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000.

A cube for every possible arrangement would cover which of these about 275 times?

The Earth would vanish under them about 275 times over; stacked in a single column instead, the same cubes would reach more than 250 light-years, far beyond the nearest stars.

If a Rubik's Cube is reassembled at random, what is the most likely result?

It cannot be solved eleven times in twelve: no sequence of turns can flip a single edge or swap just two pieces, so a randomly rebuilt cube usually lands in a position no amount of twisting can fix.

What is 'God's number', the maximum moves needed to solve any cube position?

20 was proved in July 2010, when a team used about 35 CPU-years of donated computer time to check every position; the proven limit had stood at 26 in 2007 and at 22 in 2008.

In cubing jargon, what is a memorised sequence of moves with a known effect called?

An algorithm, a term borrowed from mathematics, is usually built to change one small part of the cube and leave the rest untouched, so the same sequence can be repeated until the whole puzzle is done.

The standard move notation using letters like F, R, U and L was developed by whom?

David Singmaster, an American mathematician teaching in London, devised it in 1978; because each letter is named from the solver's point of view, a written sequence works whichever way up the cube is held.

In cube notation, what does a prime symbol after a letter (such as R') indicate?

An anticlockwise turn, judged as if you were looking straight at that face; the prime simply reverses the plain letter, so R followed by R' leaves the cube exactly as it was.

In CFOP, the most popular speedcubing method, what does the C stand for?

Cross: solvers begin by forming a cross of four edge pieces on one face, then pair up the rest of the first two layers before finishing the last layer in two further steps.

Which speedcuber, whose 1990s website popularised the CFOP method, gives it its other common name?

Jessica Fridrich published the method online in the 1990s, so many cubers simply call it the Fridrich method, although its steps were worked out by several solvers in the early 1980s.

The touch-pad timers used in official speedcubing competitions were originally designed for which other pastime?

Cup stacking's StackMat timer starts when the hands lift off its pads and stops only when both hands return, so a cuber must let go of the puzzle to stop the clock and cannot stop it by accident.

In the competitive blindfolded event, what does a competitor's recorded time cover?

Both memorisation and the solve are on the clock: timing starts when the cuber first sees the scrambled cube, so every second spent studying it costs as much as a second spent turning it blindfolded.

In the Fewest Moves Challenge, how long do competitors have to write down their solution?

One hour is allowed because the goal is the shortest solution rather than the quickest: competitors work it out on paper and hand in a written list of moves, which may run to no more than 80.

Rubik's Contraption, a robot that solved a cube in 0.38 seconds in 2018, was built by two students at which university?

MIT students Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo broke several cubes while tuning the machine; its 0.38 seconds, which includes the cameras reading the colours, beat the previous robot best of 0.637.

What is the title of Ernő Rubik's own book about his invention and its hold on the world?

Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All is the full title; in it Rubik admits he is as surprised as anyone that so simple and low-tech an object has kept its hold through decades of technological revolution.

The 4×4×4 version of the cube is sold under what name?

Rubik's Revenge, invented by Péter Sebestény, has no fixed centre pieces, so unlike on the original cube nothing tells the solver which colour belongs on which face.

Up to what size of cube does the WCA sanction speedsolving competitions?

7×7×7 is the largest official event; the first mass-produced one had to bulge like a pillow, because with flat sides its outermost pieces would lose contact with the rest of the puzzle in mid-turn.

Which twisty puzzle, an official speedcubing event, takes the form of a tetrahedron?

Pyraminx was devised by Uwe Mèffert in the early 1970s, before the cube existed, but he shelved it and only took it to a toy company once the cube craze had shown that such puzzles could sell.

As of 2021, what was the largest mass-produced cube?

21×21×21 was the biggest cube on general sale when the maker MoYu launched it; larger cubes had been built, but only as one-off record pieces by hobbyists.

Which street artist staged a 2005 Los Angeles show called 'Rubik Cubism' using cubes as pixels?

Invader, the French artist behind the pixel mosaics of video-game aliens on city walls, calls the style Rubikcubism and has since rebuilt the Mona Lisa and other masterpieces in cubes.

Pete Fecteau's 2010 mosaic 'Dream Big', made of 4,242 cubes, is a tribute to whom?

Martin Luther King Jr.'s portrait took Fecteau about 40 hours: every one of the rented cubes was twisted until one face showed the nine stickers its spot in the picture needed.

In 2016 the EU's top court ruled the cube could not be trademarked on the basis of what?

Its shape lost protection because the court said the hidden rotating mechanism had to be weighed too: a technical solution may be covered only by a patent, not monopolised as a trademark, as rival Simba Toys had argued since 2006.

In which city was Ernő Rubik born in 1944?

Budapest is also where he studied sculpture and then architecture, and where he was teaching interior design at the academy of applied arts when he built the first cube.

What did Ernő Rubik's father design for a living?

Gliders were the speciality of his father, also called Ernő Rubik, who designed dozens of aircraft; the inventor has often named him as his chief inspiration.

Ernő Rubik's follow-up toy of 1981, a chain of 24 linked wedges, is named after which animal?

Snake: unlike the cube it has no solution to find, because its wedges are simply twisted into figures such as animals; Rubik called it a tool for testing ideas rather than a problem to be solved.

Which magazine put a Rubik's Cube on its cover in March 1981?

Scientific American carried Douglas Hofstadter's column on the cube in that issue; the column, Metamagical Themas, had just succeeded Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games, and its name is an anagram of his.

In 1980 the Rubik's Cube won a one-off special prize at which country's Game of the Year awards?

Germany's Spiel des Jahres jury invented a special prize for best solitaire game on the spot to honour the cube, and has never awarded it again.

In which comedy does a solved Rubik's Cube turn into an alien device called the Continuum Transfunctioner?

Dude, Where's My Car? has Chester finish solving the cube just as two sets of aliens arrive, and it shapeshifts into the device everyone has been hunting.

CubeStormer 3, which set a robot record for the Rubik's Cube in 2014, was built mainly from which toy?

Lego Mindstorms kits and a Samsung Galaxy S4 phone made up the machine, which worked the cube with four robotic hands and finished in 3.253 seconds.

The Speed Cubers, a 2020 film about two rival Rubik's Cube champions, premiered on which platform?

Netflix premiered the film on July 29, 2020, and it was later shortlisted for the Oscar for Documentary Short Subject and nominated for a Peabody Award.

Which New York institution exhibited a Rubik's Cube in 1981 and holds one in its permanent collection?

The Museum of Modern Art exhibited the cube in 1981, while the craze was at its height, and keeps one in its design collection, a gift from the toy's manufacturer.

Which subject was Ernő Rubik teaching in Hungary when he built the first Rubik's Cube?

Architecture was Rubik's subject from 1971 to 1979; he had studied sculpture first, and building geometric models was his hobby.

What was unusual about Patrick Bossert, author of the 1981 Rubik's Cube bestseller You Can Do the Cube?

He was a schoolboy of about thirteen when he devised his solution and a picture-based notation that novices could follow, and the book became a best-seller.

What coloured the faces of the original Rubik's Cube before later versions moved to plastic panels?

Stickers, nine on each face, coloured the classic cube, and on early cubes the position of the colours varied from one cube to the next.

What nickname do cubers give the 26 miniature cubes that make up a standard Rubik's Cube?

Cubies is the usual word; each hides an inward extension that interlocks with its neighbours yet lets it move to a new position.

What did Ernő Rubik use to hold together the hand-cut blocks of his first Rubik's Cube prototypes?

Rubber bands held the first models together while Rubik hunted for a structure whose pieces could move without the whole thing falling apart; he cut and drilled every block by hand.

Which artist of impossible constructions does Rubik's Cube inventor Ernő Rubik cite as an influence?

M. C. Escher sits on Rubik's list beside Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and the inventor also admires the writers Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov.

Speedcubers measure raw hand speed in TPS, an abbreviation that stands for what?

Turns per second is the usual yardstick, and it is one reason the Roux method divides opinion: its middle-slice moves are harder to perform at high speed.

What name do speedcubers give the efficient hand movements they drill to turn a Rubik's Cube faster?

Finger tricks sit beside pattern recognition as a key skill, and more of them have been worked out for CFOP than for any other method.

How long may a competitor inspect a scrambled Rubik's Cube before an official WCA solve must begin?

15 seconds is all the study time allowed, with a judge watching a stopwatch, and running over it earns a time penalty.

Since the event's revival in 2003, how often has the Rubik's Cube World Championship normally been held?

Every two years is the rhythm, always in an odd-numbered year, and the only gap came in 2021, when the pandemic forced a cancellation.

A giant Rubik's Cube was displayed at the 1982 World's Fair, held in which Tennessee city?

Knoxville hosted the fair, and the giant cube with rotating squares, sent by Hungary for its pavilion entrance, was kept in the city afterwards.

Which tech company supplied the computers that proved in 2010 how few moves any Rubik's Cube position needs?

Google lent the computing time that let Tomas Rokicki's team check every position, after his own 2008 effort had only narrowed the answer.

Which game's pieces did the small Hungarian plastics firm that first made the Rubik's Cube already produce?

Chess pieces were the firm's line, and Rubik turned to it only after struggling to find any manufacturer in Hungary's rigid planned economy.

When did Ernő Rubik realise that the twisting Rubik's Cube he had built was a puzzle?

After scrambling it for the first time, Rubik tried to restore the original order, and only that struggle showed him the model was a challenge and not just a structure.

In which country did an ironworks owner independently patent a near-copy of the Rubik's Cube mechanism in 1976?

Japan was where Terutoshi Ishigi, a self-taught engineer, filed for his patent while Rubik's own application was still being processed, and his design is generally accepted as an independent reinvention.

Which Australian speedcuber won the Rubik's Cube world title in both 2013 and 2015?

Feliks Zemdegs won the very first competition he entered, in 2009, and went on to set more than a hundred world records across cubing events.

Speedcubing champion Max Park began cubing at his mother's urging to help with skills affected by which condition?

Autism was diagnosed when Park was a toddler, and his mother encouraged cubing to build his communication and fine motor skills; he went on to win two world titles.

A speedcubing championship organised by Guinness in March 1981 took place in which city?

Munich staged the contest with standardised scrambles and fixed inspection times, and it ended in a tie: two winners each clocked 38.0 seconds.

Which Puerto Rican boy band sang the theme song of the 1983 cartoon Rubik, the Amazing Cube?

Menudo recorded the theme because the show's human heroes were a Hispanic family, making it one of the first US cartoons with a mainly Latino cast.

Tyson Mao, a co-founder of the World Cube Association, was a contestant on which reality show in 2006?

Beauty and the Geek featured the Caltech astrophysics student, who had set the world record for solving a cube blindfolded in 2005.

Video Cube, a 1983 puzzle game later re-released under the Rubik's Cube name, was made for which console?

Atari 2600 owners could buy it only through the Atari Club, and it starred Hubie the Cube Master, who carries coloured squares around the cube one at a time.

Ernő Rubik, inventor of the Rubik's Cube, has named collecting which plants as his favourite pastime?

Succulents are his passion, and he also lists nature walks, sports and sailing on Lake Balaton among his pleasures.

Which US toy company, founded by the teddy bear's inventors, took the Rubik's Cube worldwide in 1980?

Ideal began in Brooklyn in 1903 with the first teddy bears, and in 1981 it filed suits against dozens of sellers of knock-off cubes to protect its hit.

The most popular packaging for the original Rubik's Cube showed it off, solved, inside what?

A clear cylinder of plastic displayed the solved cube like a colourful object hanging in mid-air, though some countries got cardboard boxes with instruction leaflets.

What do cubers call cases on a 4×4×4 cube, such as one flipped edge, that can never arise on a 3×3×3?

Parity errors look impossible to anyone used to the 3×3×3, yet they are still solvable: special sequences exist to fix a single flipped edge or a swapped pair.

In Rubik's Cube notation, what do the lowercase letters x, y and z instruct a solver to do?

Rotate the whole puzzle is the instruction, with x, y and z each following the direction of one face turn, so no pieces move relative to one another.

Which official speedcubing puzzle is a twelve-sided dodecahedron with 50 movable pieces?

Megaminx was invented by several people independently and sold in rival versions, one of them marketed as the Hungarian Supernova.

Which official speedcubing puzzle is a cube sliced diagonally, so that every twist affects all six faces?

Skewb was named by the writer Douglas Hofstadter in his magazine column, and the puzzle's seller liked the word enough to adopt it.

Which official speedcubing puzzle, cut into kite and triangle pieces, stops being a cube as it is scrambled?

Square-1, invented in Czechoslovakia in 1990 under the full name Back to Square One, has a middle section of just two pieces.

How is Rubik's Clock, a 1988 puzzle with nine clock faces on each side, solved?

All hands point to twelve on a solved Rubik's Clock, front and back at once; Rubik did not invent it but bought the patent from two other inventors.

Rubik's 360, a dexterity puzzle released by Ernő Rubik in 2009, takes what form?

A set of nested spheres, three in all, holds six balls that must be worked from the innermost one out to colour-coded compartments, a test of dexterity, not memory.

Udo Krell's 5×5×5 puzzle of 1981, a bigger sibling of Rubik's original, is best known by which name?

Professor's Cube solvers can borrow strategies from both the 3×3×3 and the 4×4×4, because the puzzle shares qualities with each.

Which 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube variant, also called the Bump Cube, has pieces that are all one colour?

Mirror Blocks pieces are told apart by size alone, each being a different rectangular block, so a scrambled one bristles into an uneven, bumpy surface.

Which speedcubing skill means spotting the pieces for the next step while still turning the current one?

Look-ahead is easier when a method needs no cube rotations, one reason some solvers favour Roux over CFOP.

Which cuber, fourth at the 1982 World Championship, devised a method that begins by building a 2×2×2 block?

Lars Petrus learned to cube over one unemployed summer, became champion of Sweden in 1982, and designed his system so that finished work never has to be broken up.

What does the name of the ZZ speedcubing method, proposed in 2006, refer to?

Its inventor's initials: Zbigniew Zborowski designed the method around comfortable turning, orienting every edge at the start so the cube never has to be rotated.

What do cubers call the Rubik's Cube position where every piece is in place but all twelve edges are reversed?

Superflip is its own inverse, so performing it twice returns the cube to solved, and it was long suspected of being one of the hardest positions to undo.

What is a Rubik's Cube called when its centre squares are marked so that their rotation must be solved too?

Supercube markings multiply the number of distinguishable positions more than two-thousandfold, because each centre can now be left in the wrong rotation.

In multi-blind, where competitors solve many Rubik's Cubes blindfolded in one attempt, how is the score calculated?

Solved minus unsolved gives the points, so each failure cancels out a success, and the clock only breaks ties between competitors on the same score.

Which WCA representative must attend a speedcubing competition for its results to count as official?

A Delegate oversees every official event and rules on penalties, and newcomers to the role must spend at least a year as a junior before promotion to full status.

What sits behind each centre piece of a classic Rubik's Cube, pulling it inward to keep the puzzle compact?

A spring on each fastener does the job, and older official cubes let owners tighten or loosen a screw to change the feel, where newer ones use fixed rivets.

What is the standard approach to a 4×4×4 or 5×5×5 cube, which first turns it into a 3×3×3, called?

Reduction means grouping the centre pieces by colour, then pairing up matching edges, after which only the outer faces need turning.

By what margin did Max Park win the 3×3×3 final at the 2023 Rubik's Cube World Championship?

0.01 seconds separated Park from second place in Incheon, giving him another world title six years after his first.

What do speedcubers call a preliminary turn that positions pieces for a known sequence and is undone afterwards?

A setup move is the first step of what mathematicians call a conjugate: do one thing, apply another, then undo the first.

At a speedcubing competition, which volunteer carries the scrambled Rubik's Cubes out to the competitors?

A runner ferries each cube between the scrambler and the competitor, one of several volunteer jobs alongside the judge who records each time.

In official WCA competitions, what decides the exact sequence of moves used to scramble each Rubik's Cube?

A computer program generates every scramble, and each competitor in a round receives the same ones, so nobody gets an easier start.