Author: TheRubikZone

Welcome to The Rubik Zone!

Welcome to The Rubik Zone, a site for all things related to the famous Cube of Erno Rube.

I got my first rubik's cube as a gift from my uncle. It looked cute and innocent – a bunch of brightly colored squares. A few twists later, and it was messed beyong repair, and stayed that way for months.

Now,  more than 20 years on, The Rubik Zone is here. Check out the menus to see what we have. 

On the original packaging of the first Rubik's cubes sold, the distributor boasted

More than 3 billion combinations!

This has been compared with McDonalds boasting

Over a hundred and twenty hamburgers sold!

In actual fact, there are over 43 billion billion combinations. This is a number just a bit too big for most people to grasp. But it's actually not as big as you might think.

For example, it's the cost of only 70,000 Iraq Wars, measured in Iraqi Dinars.  Now 70000 is a number I can wrap my head around.

Alternatively, imagine

  • you start buying Rubik's cubes, messing them up, and posting them off to other people.
  • Suppose you kept doing this until you had posted a cube to every single man woman and child on earth.
  • Suppose also you persuaded everybody else to start doing the same. 
At the end of this, there would be just over 43 billion billion cubes lying around. And guess what? There'd be about a 2 in 5 chance that one of those cubes was actually solved, by pure chance.
 
So it's not as impossible as you might have thought!
 
Unfortunately, all those cubes would cover the earth's land mass to a depth of 15 kilometres. I suppose we could live on top of them and not worry about global warming any more (it's pretty chilly 15 km above sea level).
 
Or, we could ship them off to space. We could build a stack of them, 8 cubes wide and 8 cubes long, reaching clear to Alpha Centauri.
 
Or just let them collapse into a big ball, 250 km across. Just imagine, a new, Rubik moon! It would have its own gravity – not strong, admittedly, but strong enough that a visitor couldn't just jump off. The only problem would be that if it fell back to earth, the shock wave would flatten 90% of the trees and buildings on the entire planet.
 
Anyway, check out the menus to find out how to solve the rubik's cube – or cheat at solving it – or see what patterns you can make, or how to solve a cube of any size at all!