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| The Grandma with her Rubik's Cube in Can Déu |
Today, The Grandma has gone to Can Déu Civic Centre in Les Corts, Barcelona, to participate in a Rubik's Cube Competition.
The Grandma is a great fan of this toy which made its international debut in Earl's Court, London, on a day like today in 1980.
The Grandma is a great fan of this toy which made its international debut in Earl's Court, London, on a day like today in 1980.
After taking a one day-break to introduce Jordi Santanyí and before going to Can Déu, The Grandma has continued with her English studies. She has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 10).
Rubik's Cube is a 3-D combination puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. Originally called the Magic Cube, the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toy Corp.
In 1980 via businessman Tibor Laczi and Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer, and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle that year.
As of January 2009, 350 million cubes had been sold worldwide making it the world's top-selling puzzle game. It is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy.
On the original classic Rubik's Cube, each of the six faces was covered by nine stickers, each of one of six solid colours: white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow. The current version of the cube has been updated to coloured plastic panels instead, which prevents peeling and fading. In currently sold models, white is opposite yellow, blue is opposite green, and orange is opposite red, and the red, white and blue are arranged in that order in a clockwise arrangement. On early cubes, the position of the colours varied from cube to cube.
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| Ernő Rubik with his Cubes |
An internal pivot mechanism enables each face to turn independently, thus mixing up the colours. For the puzzle to be solved, each face must be returned to have only one colour. Similar puzzles have now been produced with various numbers of sides, dimensions, and stickers, not all of them by Rubik.
Although the Rubik's Cube reached its height of mainstream popularity in the 1980s, it is still widely known and used. Many speedcubers continue to practice it and similar puzzles; they also compete for the fastest times in various categories.
Since 2003, the World Cube Association, the Rubik's Cube's international governing body, has organised competitions worldwide and recognise world records.
In March 1970, Larry D. Nichols invented a 2×2×2 Puzzle with Pieces Rotatable in Groups and filed a Canadian patent application for it. Nichols's cube was held together by magnets. Nichols was granted U.S. Patent 3,655,201 on 11 April 1972, two years before Rubik invented his Cube.
More information: Rubik's
On 9 April 1970, Frank Fox applied to patent an amusement device, a type of sliding puzzle on a spherical surface with at least two 3×3 arrays intended to be used for the game of noughts and crosses. He received his UK patent (1344259) on 16 January 1974.
In the mid-1970s, Ernő Rubik worked at the Department of Interior Design at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest. 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 realise that he had created a puzzle until the first time he scrambled his new Cube and then tried to restore it.
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| The Rubik's Cube |
Rubik applied for a patent in Hungary for his Magic Cube, Bűvös kocka in Hungarian, on 30 January 1975, and HU170062 was granted later that year.
The first test batches of the Magic Cube were produced in late 1977 and released in Budapest toy shops. Magic Cube was held together with interlocking plastic pieces that prevented the puzzle being easily pulled apart, unlike the magnets in Nichols's design.
With Ernő Rubik's permission, businessman Tibor Laczi took a Cube to Germany's Nuremberg Toy Fair in February 1979 in an attempt to popularise it. It was noticed by Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer and they signed a deal with Ideal Toys in September 1979 to release the Magic Cube worldwide. Ideal wanted at least a recognisable name to trademark; of course, that arrangement put Rubik in the spotlight because the Magic Cube was renamed after its inventor in 1980. The puzzle made its international debut at the toy fairs of London, Paris, Nuremberg and New York in January and February 1980.
More information: Gizmodo
After its international debut, the progress of the Cube towards the toy shop shelves of the West was briefly halted so that it could be manufactured to Western safety and packaging specifications. A lighter Cube was produced, and Ideal decided to rename it. The Gordian Knot and Inca Gold were considered, but the company finally decided on Rubik's Cube, and the first batch was exported from Hungary in May 1980.
Rubik's Cubes continued to be marketed and sold throughout the 1980s and 90s, but it was not until the early 2000s that interest in the Cube began increasing again. In the US sales doubled between 2001 and 2003, and The Boston Globe remarked that it was becoming cool to own a Cube again.
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| The Rubik's Cube development |
The 2003 World Rubik's Games Championship was the first speedcubing tournament since 1982. It was held in Toronto and was attended by 83 participants. The tournament led to the formation of the World Cube Association in 2004. Annual sales of Rubik branded cubes were said to have reached 15 million worldwide in 2008.
In Rubik's cubers' parlance, a memorised sequence of moves that has a desired effect on the cube is called an algorithm. This terminology is derived from the mathematical use of algorithm, meaning a list of well-defined instructions for performing a task from a given initial state, through well-defined successive states, to a desired end-state. Each method of solving the Rubik's Cube employs its own set of algorithms, together with descriptions of what effect the algorithm has, and when it can be used to bring the cube closer to being solved.
More information: Hobby Lark
Many algorithms are designed to transform only a small part of the cube without interfering with other parts that have already been solved so that they can be applied repeatedly to different parts of the cube until the whole is solved. For example, there are well-known algorithms for cycling three corners without changing the rest of the puzzle or flipping the orientation of a pair of edges while leaving the others intact.
Some algorithms do have a certain desired effect on the cube but may also have the side-effect of changing other parts of the cube. Such algorithms are often simpler than the ones without side-effects and are employed early on in the solution when most of the puzzle has not yet been solved and the side-effects are not important. Most are long and difficult to memorise. Towards the end of the solution, the more specific, and usually more complicated, algorithms are used instead.
Complex things, if you don't understand them,
it seems complicated. If you understand them,
and we know how to handle it, it became simple.
Ernő Rubik
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