Google celebrates Rubik's Cube 40th bday with interactive doodle

“Our whole life is solving puzzles...We turn the cube and it twists us...A good puzzle, it's a fair thing. Nobody is lying. It's very clear, and the problem depends just on you…" ~~ Ernő Rubik, Hungarian inventor, architect and professor of architecture; Inventor of Rubik's Cube (1974), Rubik's Magic, Rubik's Magic: Master Edition, Rubik's Snake.

Four decades ago today, Rubik's Cube, the worlds top-selling toy in the world launched.

Happy 40th birthday to Rubik's Cube. Amazingly as of 2009 this colorful, 3-D game puzzle reached 350 million sales globally.

Rubik made the original prototypes of his cube by hand, making tiny holes in blocks of wood, threading rubber bands through them for holding the cubes together.

Rubik originally coined his puzzle "Magic Cube" in 1975 in Hungary. American company, Ideal Toys of New York obtained a license agreement in 1979.

Ideal's major branding strategy was to have a unique identity for the cube, and appropriately named it after its inventor, Rubik, in 1980 and "Rubik's Cube" began mass market production.

According to a recent Europa article, Rubik's influencers include Leonardo da Vinci who Rubik regards as the Renaissance man, Michelangelo who he respects as a polymath painter, sculptor, and architect, M.C. Escher, an artist who built impossible constructions and grappled with the explorations of infinity. Philosophers and writers Rubik admires are Voltaire, Stendhal, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hungarian poet Attila József, Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov. In the field of architecture, Rubik is an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.

A standard Rubik's Cube measures about 2¼ inches on each side and is comprised of twenty-six unique miniature cubes, known as "cubies" or "cubelets." Each of these tiny cubies includes a hidden cubie inside that interlocks with the other interlocking cubes.

This enables a user to move them around in different locations to create the ideal pattern -- all of the same colors on each of the total 6 external sides of the cube.

A single core piece consists of three intersecting axes holding the six center squares in place but letting them rotate, and twenty smaller plastic pieces which fit into it to form the assembled puzzle.


According to an article by Scott Vaughen, Professor of Mathematics, Miami Dade College titled "Counting the Permutations of the Rubik's Cube," there are 43 quintrillion ways to arrange the cubes - {8! \times 3^7 \times (12!/2) \times 2^{11}} = 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 or 43 quintillion.


 Official Rubik's Cube Web site Rubiks.com
 Rubik's Cube on Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik's_cube
 The Little Cube that Changed the World, International Business News http://www.ibtimes.com/rubiks-cube-40th-anniversary-9-facts-behind-famous-3-d-toy-puzzle-1576562
 Europa Interview with Ernő Rubik, http://www.create2009.europa.eu/ambassadors/profiles/erno_rubik.html
 Photos courtesy of Wikimedia.org

@GBDaly    
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