Puzzles have always fascinated me very much. Sudoku ,Scrabble,crosswords and many other puzzle games on mobile & pc are brainstorming!! I wish the exams were full of puzzles. I won’t mind flunking in such exams !! Answers of the puzzles solved remain etched in our minds for a long time. Completing puzzles and crossword and board games have been beneficial for me. I had a highly volatile memory. I used to forget birthdays of friends & relatives (thanks to facebook now),forget the grocery items listed by mom & get scolded!! Now, I have been able to maintain atleast a short term memory! HOW??? BY CUBING!!
Rubik’s Cube is a wonderful puzzle. It is one of the society’s modern day mysteries. ''We turn the Cube and it twists us.'' --Erno Rubik.
RUBIK’S Cube is the incredibly addictive, multi- dimensional challenge that has fascinated puzzle fans around the world. There is something special about this colorful, 3-D puzzle that seems to captivated the imagination of even the most lethargic student (ME). Over 100 million cubes have been sold and at least one in every five people in the world has twisted, jumbled and enjoyed this immensely popular puzzle.
It took many days of frustration, but I finally mastered the Rubik’s cube. And I’m a proud Cubaholic.
RUBIK’S Cube has been called “the perfect puzzle” and “the best puzzle ever”. The Cube has 43 quintillion (THAT’S a million million million!!) different possible configurations and only ONE solution. If you made a single turn of one of the Cube’s faces every second, it would take you 1,400 million million years to go through all the possible configurations. (By way of comparison, the universe itself is only 14 thousand million years old.) The easiest way to solve RUBIK’S Cube is layer by layer, starting at the top. It is very difficult to solve face by face, and with billions of combinations, nearly impossible to solve by trial and error.
NOW, WHAT ARE THE BENFITS OF PLAYING WITH & SOLVING THE RUBIK’S CUBE??
It improves spatial awareness, exercises the brain, demonstrates the need for practice & represents A PURE EXAMPLE OF TRUE LEARNING!! I like the “hands-on” approach of learning. It is not just a fun time wasting toy! It develops sharp mental reflexes as well as makes us understand the importance of persistence and determination. For geeks, there is a lot of science involved in solving the Rubik’s cube! PUZZLING SCIENCE!!
The Rubik’s cube is an excellent tool to enhance spatial reasoning. It provides students with a framework for solving problems. The sequential reasoning needed to solve the cube is applicable to many other types of problems. Every solver of the Cube uses an algorithm,which is a sequence of steps for solving the Cube. One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm,one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves ;this is known as GOD’S ALGORITHM. Programmers, find it!! The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called GOD’S NUMBER. Mathematics geeks show it practically less than 20!!
ERNO RUBIK QOUTES:
“Nobody has been able to improve on the basic design, which pleases me as a designer, or on the engineering, which pleases me as an engineer.”
“It’s simple but it’s complex; it’s stable but it’s flexible; it’s easy to understand, but it’s hard to work out the solution.”
“The Cube is part of me because I designed it, I created it. It’s my child, if you like. But it’s not a newborn. When you have children you spend a lot of time with them when they’re young, nurturing them. But when they grow up they develop a life of their own and you don’t need to be with them all the time anymore. The Cube is like that.”
“For me, it was never about speed, it was about looking at a problem and finding the solution. So I can solve it, but not very fast.”
The Rubik’s cube has been in movies too. The Pursuit of Happyness, a movie in which Will Smith’s character impresses his future employer by solving the Rubik’s cube. So YOU can earn millions of dollars if you learned to solve the cube (* Conditions apply). 3 IDIOTS in which RANCHO plays with it in the corridors. TERA NAAL LOVE HO GAYA in which a thief (played by a girl who says TO PILFER i.e steal IS AN ART) solves it. There is another movie in which Madhavan plays with a 4x4x4 cube, another variant of the Rubik’s Cube. I don’t remember the name of it. So, go get yourselves a Rubik’s cube and impress your family, friends, and teachers by solving it. Just don’t play with it in the class . You might get it confiscated!!
