Stuff You Should Know - Selects: The Rubik's Cube Episode

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

Rubik's Cubes. Ronald Reagan. Jerry Falwell. Just Say No. One of these things was awesome. Take a guess and hop on board this classic episode, aka the 80s train.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's Select I've chosen our August 2019 episode on one of the best-selling toys of all time, the Rubik's Cube. It's an engaging episode on an unlikely global trend sprung from a Hungarian architect's beautiful mind. So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bright and Jerry's over there and we're cubing it up with Rubik the Cube. Did you see that cartoon, Rubik the Amazing Cube? Did you come across that? Okay, I feel like we are well within our rights as far as fair use goes since we are talking about this. To at least play the highly disturbing but also strangely cute voice of Rubik the Amazing Cube.

Can I play this real quick? Sure. Okay. My name is Rubik. That is it. Wow. It is awfully unusual, especially when you see this cube, they just basically took it. Do you remember the goblin face on Maximum Overdrive on the front of that semi?

Sort of. It's kind of like a cuter version of that that they put onto a Rubik's Cube, put some feet on it and then gave it superpowers. That's Rubik the Amazing Cube. Wow. So back to Rubik, Chuck. Yeah, it was kind of hard to believe that it took until 2014 for this thing to be granted at National Toy Hall of Fame inductee status.

It seems like it would have been much sooner than that because they have sold hundreds and hundreds of millions of Rubik's Cube since 1980. I had one. I still have one. I could do it at one point. Oh, really? Yeah. I could do it in a couple of minutes.

Wow, Chuck. I'm impressed. I had no idea. Yeah. I can still do one side and the top row surrounding that side on all sides. That's where I completely forget. Oh, I see. So you couldn't do it in a couple of minutes now.

You just have, you could in the past? Yeah, when I was nine. Okay. Well, I'm impressed. I've never been able to solve a Rubik's Cube. I've never been sucked in enough to really spend a significant amount of time. But I was playing with my niece's Rubik's Cube the other day studying for this. And I was like, yeah, I could see how somebody would become obsessed with this kind of thing

for sure. Yeah, it was fun. And it was, you know, to call it all the rage is an understatement. It was one of the most popular toys of all time, invented in 1974 by a math enthusiast in Hungary, an architect and professor named Erno Rubik. Appropriately enough. They named him after the Cube. That's right.

And if you don't know what we're talking about, it seems weird to describe a Rubik's Cube, but we'll probably be taking a task if we do not. I would say just come out from under the rock that you've been living under. But we may have some young listeners who don't even know what this thing is, this piece of 80s ephemera, even though it's not ephemera because they're still pretty popular. But it is a Cube made up of 26 little mini cubes called Cubies, which is kind of a cute little name. I think so too.

Not as cute as Rubik, the amazing Cube, but yeah. Little Cubies. And they are in a three inch by three inch by three inch, well, that's not quite true, a three by three by three grid, eventually creating a Cube that measures 2.25 inches or 5.7 centimeters per side. Right. And so what? There's six Cube faces because it's a Cube and each face has a different color.

There's orange, blue, green, yellow, white and red. And when you, when you mix these things up, it's just a jumble or riot of different colors like you've never seen in your life. But the point is to move these Cubies around through the 18 different ways you can move any given Cube so that all of the colors are lined up. All the colored Cubies are all the same on each face. And it sounds easy, friends, it is not easy. Not at all.

Like maybe for some people it's easy, but for the rest of us normal folks, us normies, it is not easy in any way, shape or form. No, it is not. And in fact, they even suggest that you read about how to solve the Rubik's Cube. It is the very rare individual that can literally just figure it out without any help at all. That's really tough to do. So it's not like, you're not a cheat if you look at like how to solve the Rubik's Cube and then memorize these patterns and practice them.

That's sort of the point. Right. Yeah. Like go look it up. Like it's fine. No one will get mad at you for that. Yeah. Cause it's no fun to never solve a puzzle.

Well, that's why I think I've never gotten sucked in. I was like, I'm not even, there's no way I'm going to possibly stumble across this. And I just don't think like this. My spatial reasoning is terrible. I'm not great at math, I'm color blind. Everything just looks white. It's not the toy for you. No, it's really not.

I can't discern squares from circles. It's just, I'm off. So originally the Rubik's Cube was called the Magic Cube and it was invented, like you said by Erno Rubik who is Hungarian. So it was originally called the Bivis Kotska, which is a Magic Cube in the Hungarian. And Kotska means butthead, I believe. It does. Butthead is what it was originally called.

It was the Bivis and Butthead. Oh, right. Nice, man. It's like, where's he going with this? After all these years, it's great, no, I didn't, but I was like, I'm going with this. We'll go with this. It's Chuck. I trust him.

And I paid off too. So Mr. Rubik got his Hungarian patent on the mechanical design of this in 1977. And it was in Hungary only for a while. And it did pretty well in Hungary, but that's kind of where it stayed. It was because of the politics of the time and the fact that it was Hungary. It was not super easy to get an American patent or to bring it over and market it here in the West. So it was pretty much a Hungarian local sensation for its early, like probably first year.

Yeah, he had like a Hungarian toy manufacturer make like 10,000 of them, but he wasn't happy with them. He had to run off at 5,000. So there were 5,000 of these things floating around Budapest and maybe Hungary in general. And it was just total serendipity that there was a guy named T-Bor Laxie. And I'm quite sure that's not exactly how you say his last name, but that's how it's spelled. It's probably like Lucia or something like that.

But T-Bor, I just love that name. It's a great name. He was an entrepreneur who had left Hungary and moved to Austria. So he had really developed a taste for capitalism while he happened to be visiting back home in Budapest when he was at a restaurant and he noticed a waiter playing with the Beavish Kotska, the Magic Cube. And he said, you there, what is that? And he said, well, it's the Beavish Kotska.

How about I sell it to you for a dollar? And I believe he bought that for a dollar, played around with it for a minute and was like, this could be big. So he found out who invented it and he scheduled a meeting with Erno Rubik. Yeah. And he would say later on that Erno Rubik had a lot to do with why he decided to get into business with them. Here's his quote.

He said, when Rubik first walked into the room, I felt like giving him some money. He looked like a beggar. He was terribly dressed. You got to remember this guy's a professor, so they're not known for their sharp attire. Right. He was terribly dressed and he had a cheap Hungarian cigarette hanging out of his mouth. And I knew I had a genius on my hands and I told him, we could sell millions. Yeah.

And he was right. Oh man, was he ever right? He understated it actually. The T-Boar, I'm just going to call him T-Boar, he took this magic cube and he started going to toy fairs. And I think he struck out at a few of them, but he really hit it out of the park at the Nuremberg Toy Fair when he met a toy expert who had connections with Ideal Toy Company. Do you remember Ideal back in the day?

I think I do for sure. I'm pretty sure they made that, what was the Derridavel's name, Evil Knievel. I think they made the Evil Knievel stunt bike. You know what's funny is they make those now for other, they have, there's like an Incredibles stunt bike with a plastic girl and it's the same exact function we have one in our house and you load it up and crank it and there she goes. Is it the exact same mold they just put like different paint on it or something like that? Because I love knockoff toys, man.

It's slightly different in its design, but it's clearly like the same exact toy. So at the Nuremberg Toy Fair, T-Boar runs into the guy from Ideal and they end up purchasing it. They get the rights to this, the global rights and they basically sign up to create a million Rubik's Cubes. Yeah. Also, we should say at this toy fair, he did a pretty smart thing instead of like buying a booth.

He just came and worked the floor with Rubik's Cubes and got this like ground buzz going by walking around and giving these things to people and like that's genius, like for something like this, that's the perfect way to pique someone's curiosity is not to have some flashy like spinning giant Rubik's Cube is to actually get it in the hands of people walking around the floor. Right. Especially if you say, I'm T-Boar. Let's party.

I bet he wanted to call it T-Boar's Cube. It's a pretty good name. He probably did. Although he was smart because remember originally it was called the Magic Cube. At some point, if it wasn't T-Boar, it was Ideal who said, we're going to rename this the Rubik's Cube. And I'm sure Erno Rubik was like, oh, well, okay, I guess if you insist. I wonder if he was into it or not, or if he pushed forward or if he was like, I'm not

really into that, but if you think it'll sell cubes. That's what I'm guessing he probably did. He has that look. I don't think he was going to stand in the way of it, but he was not like vying for it by any means. That's my impression, but I'm just totally making that up. But I have the same impression, which means that if you put our two impressions together, it equals fact.

So Ideal sells 100 million Rubik's Cubes in the first two years in 1980 and 81. They just signed up to sell 1 million. They sold 100 million in two years. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure they had problems keeping up with production. Some of the accolades in 80 and 81, it won the UK's Toy of the Year award two years running. In 82, there were five books about solving it on the New York Times bestseller list, one of which I owned.

I owned the classic, The Simple Solution to the Rubik's Cube by James G. Norse. Cute. He was a chemistry student at Stanford and get this dude. This book was the number one bestselling book of 1981, period. He sold 6.7 million books and it is still the fasting selling book in the history of Bantam books. Is that right? Can you believe that?

Out of all the books that year, that was the number one. I can because that really underscores just how nuts, not just America, the world went for Rubik's Cube, that the number one selling book was a book about solving the toy. That was it. Yeah. They had sold 500 million of them by the time 1986 rolled around. Talking about the books though for another second, at one point, the number one, two, and four positions on the New York Times bestseller list were all Rubik's Cube solution books.

Three was probably Stephen King or something. Probably. One of those books was written by a 12-year-old named Patrick Bossert called You Can Do the Cube, which is pretty adorable if you think about it. And Christian Slater made a movie called Gleaming the Cube. One of my all-time favorites. Which had nothing to do with Rubik's Cubes as it turns out. No, it's about skateboarding.

That's right. So there's just a craze going on around the world. Everyone is into the Rubik's Cube. Everyone's buying one. They sold like, I've seen anywhere from 350 million. The highest I've seen is 600 million. They sold a ton of these things, hundreds and hundreds of millions of them around the world.

Those were the official ones too. There were plenty of knockoffs. Sure. There was books on the New York Times bestseller list about this. It was featured in Time, Scientific American, New Scientist. There was a paper that was printed in the New England Journal of Medicine. They talked about Cubist's thumb, which is a real thing. It's a type of tendonitis in your thumb that you get in your non-dominant hand.

Because that's the hand that you use to stabilize the Rubik's Cube. And so the edge of the cube pressing into the heel of your thumb where it meets the rest of your thumb. That could create tendonitis for people who were staying up for days on end just playing with this thing, trying to beat this puzzle. There was a craze like no other. I say we take a break and we come back and we talk about Mr. Rubik or maybe he's a doctor. I'm going to call him Dr. Rubik and how he created the mechanics of this puzzle.

I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Patrick curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Visit Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, so supposedly Dr. Rubik, surely he's a doctor. Let's call him Professor Rubik because he's definitely an architecture professor and a math genius. Surely though, I'm with you, he's got to be a doctor. All right, Professor Dr. Rubik supposedly was not even trying to create this puzzle in 1974 when he first started out. As legend has it, he was trying to create a mathematical model for 3D design class, which makes sense considering his job.

Other people say no, he was just really kind of a guy that liked to tinker. He was fascinated by geometry and shapes, and he was trying to just solve a problem of mechanics in three dimensions. But according to the toy hall of fame, he was very much trying to invent a puzzle, and that may just be folklore. Yeah, he knew what he wanted. He wanted to make this 3 by 3 cube that was made up of smaller cubes that could all interact and twist around.

He had the idea for the Rubik's Cube, which was step one, but step two was a doozy. And that was figuring out how to invent a mechanical solution to make this thing work the way he wanted it to. And apparently there was a pretty good article on mental floss by a guy named Noah Davis, who recounted that one day Rubik was walking down the Danube, alongside the Danube in Budapest and looked down and noticed that there was just a pile of nice polished, rounded river rocks and thought, I've got it. I've been thinking about a cube.

Everything's got to be a cube. But what if I added a sphere to the mix too, and that these things rotated around a sphere that would give the freedom of motion that I need to make this thing work? And that was it. That was the solution to the puzzle, as it were. Yeah. I mean, if you're like me and probably lots of other kids in the early 80s, you took your Rubik's Cube apart at some point.

Did you? I never saw one. Oh, really? I watched a video on this. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I got a screwdriver out in pretty short order and popped those things apart. And it's kind of cool when you look at the, you know, when you take all those cubies out,

you get down to the center, and those three axes, and they have each one is tipped with two opposing center cubies. It's kind of cool looking, and then it makes sense how all these things fit together and how it works. Yeah. Another way to think about it is just think about like a sphere, a ball, and then you've got six arms sticking out at right angles from it so that it forms a three-dimensional plus sign.

And then the end of each one of these arms is a cube, a colored cube, and that's the skeleton of the thing. And then what Erno Rubik figured out was that that's all that needed to be attached to the center. You could make the other cubes attached to those face cubes, those center cubes. Cubies. Cubies. And you could make some cubes, cubies attached to those cubies, and then other cubies attached

to the other cubies, and then they will all kind of rotate around each other, but they're all really rotating on three different axes coming out of that sphere. It's a gene, like this guy has gotten, like, if he started a craze and is, you know, kind of viewed as this great inventor for the toy, like math, physics, architecture, in a number of different fields. He's viewed as... Mechanical engineering for sure. Yeah.

He's viewed as just a god in some senses for cracking this problem and creating this three-dimensional structure that actually works in reality that people can learn and study from. That's right. So he's figured out this, the mechanics of it all, but it's still not a puzzle yet until he applies these colors. That's what makes it a puzzle because, like we said at the beginning, the idea is that you have all the colors on each side matching one another. He applies these colored stickers all over, mixes and twists it up a little bit, and he's

like, I've invented the cube. Then he's like, wait a minute. I don't know how to solve the puzzle. So he actually had built this thing, stickered it up, and looked at it, I imagine, with some level of accomplishment, and then realized the biggest, probably the hardest thing to do in this whole process still lay in front of him, which was, because there were no books out at this point, he invented it. So he had to figure out how to solve his own puzzle, and it took him a while.

It took him a month from what I saw. Yeah. And I imagine he worked on this pretty much nonstop to figure this thing out. He did, and he would write down the different moves, combination of moves, which now they're called algorithms. It's just types of moves that if you do them in a specific sequence, we'll solve a specific jumbled Rubik's Cube, right? That's right.

So he wrote them down. He kind of kept track of it, and that was the first time anyone had applied analysis to this, but it would not be the last, obviously, as the New York Times bestseller shows. But the reason why it's so difficult to solve a Rubik's Cube just by happenstance is that it's just the sheer number of possible configurations of the cube, right? Each face has nine cubies, and there's six faces. So there's 54 cubies, but they all relate to one another. And so if you move one, that's one configuration.

If you move it another direction, that's another configuration, and so on, and so on. And so with these 54 cubies, Chuck, are you ready for this? Yes. The possible number of configurations is 43 quintillion, 252 quadrillion, 3 trillion, 274 billion, 489 million, 856,000 possible configurations of a Rubik's Cube. Amazing. And one of them, one is the right one, where all six faces are all the same color cubies. Just one.

Just doing it accidentally, your chances are one in about 43 trillion that you're going to stumble upon that right combination. That's right. Which is pretty amazing. Don't you think? Yes. And by the way, I think I said in there 54, there's 20 cubes. I believe there's 54 faces.

Yeah. I mean, that's the deal. Each cubie has three sides or two sides, depending on if it's a corner or an edge, or one if it's in the center. So it's kind of confusing. But nine times six, so nine squares, or nine different colors, squares times six faces is 54, I think. Yeah, 54 faces, 20 something cubies.

This is how good at math we are. Man, it's really, because it's so funny, because it's such a simple little thing. But once you start really breaking it down, you're like, we could make this super confusing if we tried hard. For sure. But what people have figured out is that you may have a one in 43 quintillion chance of stumbling across the right configuration by accident, but what people have figured out is that there are a combination of moves, like front right, up twice, and then down.

That's an algorithm. And if you apply that to a certain kind of scramble, the certain configuration of a scrambled Rubik's Cube, it will bring it back to solved. And so people have spent a lot of time developing algorithms, and that's what Erno Rubik was originally doing when he was like, oh, if I do this, this, and this, it will make it solved. And he wrote that down. That's what's called an algorithm.

Yeah. And I remember in the book, like each book had their own little shorthand, I guess. But I remember the one that I had, it definitely had the algorithms all spelled out with like shorthand for what each move was called. So it would sort of look like a math problem made out of letters. Right. And I saw a U for up and D for down, which makes a lot of sense. But then also, you can move something to the right, you can twist one of the rows of cubes

to the right, but you can also twist it to the left too. So I saw an apostrophe after L apostrophe would be counterclockwise left. And then you can add a number too. So you do that twice, which is really a 180 degree counterclockwise turn. So interesting. It really is kind of interesting. But first, you know, when I first went over this article the first time, just taking it in, I was like, oh, this is pretty neat.

But the Rubik's Cube I found has many, many layers to it, and you can really keep going deeply into it, well beyond just playing with the cube and trying to solve it. Like there's a lot of math involved, there's a lot of physics and mechanics involved. I mean, you can get sucked into it as you like, buddy. Try not to go insane like Erno Rubik did. He did not. When he set that building on fire, full of Rubik's Cubes. It's interesting though, how big of a hit this became, sort of it flew in the face of

a lot of, like, sort of rules of the toy industry in that it didn't make sounds. It didn't have interchangeable parts. It didn't have things that you could sell along with it, like, you know, clothing. I guess you could dress your little Rubik's Cube, but then you have a special relationship with it, I guess so. Right. You could dress it up and be like, I'm Ruby. It didn't have batteries.

It was never like, well, I guess it appeared on a TV show. Was that a TV show? Yeah. It was a Saturday morning cartoon that came on right before Pac-Man, which was honestly one of the all-time great cartoons ever. Yeah. It just, it wasn't marketable though, like you would think a toy would be. The reason that it appealed and endured is because it is a real challenge and you get

a real sense of reward once you've done it. Right. And that really hooks people. It really does hook people. And again, there's, like, not, there's no shame in going and looking up algorithms to solve Rubik's Cubes, like, just processes. And in fact, if you start doing any kind of research on Rubik's Cubes, you'll find, like, there's actually specific methods of attack that people suggest for beginners to start

with. There's one called the White Cross method. Classic. Which entails eating a handful of White Cross gas station speed. Just staying up and eating. Staying up for four days until you get done. No. It's actually, you start with the edge pieces and then you move to the corner pieces, putting

them all in place, and then you go on from there, starting with the white face of the cube. Right. And this toy was a big hit anyway, but it has endured not because of stocking stuffers or nostalgia, but it has endured all these years later because of competition. So let's take a break now and we'll talk about speed cubing right after this. Well now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck, it's stuff you should know, all right.

I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. It doesn't look good, there is a risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, so the Rubik's Cube comes out in the world basically in 1980. And the next year, the very next year, countries around the world were holding national championships for solving Rubik's Cubes as fast as you possibly could. It's called speed cubing. Yes. And then a year after that, they all got together, all the champions of the countries, for the very first Rubik's Cube World Championship in Budapest, which is kind of cool. And that's what has kept people going for so long, because people are still trying to

beat these records. I saw a kid, and it's kind of hard to tell what the top times, because they list the top times in these competitions. But I saw a kid on YouTube do it in like six seconds, or four or five seconds. I saw one do it in 3.47. Yeah, I don't know how it's officially judged, though. There's a timer, and there's one of those mats that you keep your hands on. Well, no, I get that.

But why does it say that those aren't world records then? I don't know, that's what I saw was the world record was in 2018, and it was 3.47 seconds by Yuxiang Du, sorry, of China. See, I've seen other things listed. I just don't know if there's like, the bodies aren't speaking to one another, or what? Maybe that was a non-championship time, like a non-sanctioned event. Or even maybe it was a qualifier or something like that, so it doesn't count as the world record unless you get whatever time is done at the world championship.

That's considered the world record, who knows? It's crazy to see how fast these kids, and it's usually kids that win, I guess with their little nimble fingers and brain sponges. It's crazy how fast they're doing it. It doesn't look real. It looks like some sort of weird faked video. Yeah, and here's the other thing, too. I'm glad you mentioned brain sponges, because it is like an intellectual pursuit.

From the beginning of this toys release in 1980, they went a different route. You're saying it doesn't require batteries, it doesn't make a noise or anything like that. They went a different route in advertising it, and said, this is an intelligent game. Like, sure, Isaac Newton discovered gravity, but could he solve a Rubik's Cube? They really kind of play that up, and it's true, because these kids who are solving, or people who are solving Rubik's Cubes, super fast. It's not just luck, or their fingers are just moving for them. They have memorized hundreds, if not thousands, of these algorithms, and have gotten to the

point where they can look at a cube and figure out which algorithm is going to solve it the fastest. And then when the time starts, they can also move their fingers really, really quick, and that's how they're getting these amazing times. It's not just speed and dexterity. It's also knowing what algorithm is going to work best. Yeah, for sure. It died out pretty quickly, like most fad toys.

Once you sell a lot of these, you don't need another one, unless you break yours or something. So it's kind of one of those things, which is, again, why it flew in the face of the toy industry, because they couldn't sell ancillary products alongside it. But it died out pretty quickly, and the championship in 1982 was the last one for about 20 years until the internet comes along, and all of a sudden there are people posting faster times than ever before than 20 years earlier. And in 2003, in Canada, there was a speedcuber named Dan Gosby who organized a competition in Toronto, and this is where they're getting it down to like 20 seconds, and they have

different categories like blindfolded, fewest moves, one-handed, feet, feet to do last year. One did it in 23 seconds by foot, which was about the quickest time by hand at the first competition. Yes, and it took them longer to figure out that they had solved it than it did to actually solve it, because they had to use a stick to turn the Rubik's Cube over, because they had used their feet to solve it. And I think when you participate... It didn't pay off as well as I thought it would.

It was all right. You get 15 seconds to look at the Cube over. They are all started, like the Cubes are all started the same with like a computer-generated random 25-move scramble. It's just fair. You get that 15 seconds, you check it out, you set it on your mat, and then you go. And it's just, like I said, it's amazing to see these things done in like sub-4 seconds. Yeah, because their hands actually do kind of blur, like you can't really follow where

their hands are at any given time. They barely touch the Rubik's Cube, and they're using, to be fair, they're using specialized speed Cubes. They're not just using like off-the-shelf Rubik's Cubes. Yeah, we'll talk about those, or should we just go ahead and talk about them? It's amazing. Sure. Yeah.

So people go to the trouble of getting a speed Cube. It's like, you can get one for... You can get a good one from what I understand for about 70, 75 bucks. And these things are literally well-oiled machines that are just super fast. Some of them use magnets so that you can tell when they're snapped into place, and they move a lot more easily and quickly. You can just look at it and be like, that's a high-end Rubik's Cube right there. Yeah, like you can pay to get your Cube serviced and checked out at Speed Cube Shop.

So someone will take it apart, a technician, and they will look at each of those little Cubes for defects, and like, has it got a little bump here that will slow it down? They'll smooth that out. Like you said, sometimes they use magnets, and one of the reasons for the magnets is, it creates that snap when a turn is completed. Because if you want to move these things really fast, you don't want it to be... Even if it's an eighth of an inch out of whack, you're not going to be able to turn it the other way.

Right. So you want it to snap and lock into place, it's just amazing how engineered these things have become in these Speed Cubing competitions. Right. Well, I mean, just to keep up, you've got to get yourself a Speed Cube. If you showed up like to an actual competition with just a regular Rubik's Cube, I don't know if you'd be laughed out of the place, but they would certainly feel bad for you. You know what they should do is like, because I remember them loosening up really well and

getting faster just because you played with it more. Instead of giving everyone Speed Cubes and trying to get this ultra Red Bull record, which they sponsor the events now by the way, they should give everyone out of the package, make it as hard as possible. I agree. I think that there would be some preteens who are really high strung that would cry if they were confronted with that challenge. If they had to put their Speed Cube down?

Yeah, it'd be like, this is not fair. No one prepared me in my life for this. I did mention Red Bull because it was kind of controversial. For many years, the Rubik's World Championships were co-hosted by the World Cube Association with the support of the brand, but then clearly some money changed hands. A couple of years ago, there was the Red Bull Rubik's Cube World Championship. Red Bull got involved, the brand Rubik got involved, which means there was money changing hands.

You're really fascinated with that money changing hands, aren't you? Well, I mean, sure, because I think everyone saw it as for what it was, which was all of a sudden there's a corporate sponsor attached to it. That is a pretty important point because there was already a World Championship and it was like a grassroots organization that had grown up since 2003 and they were doing really well and then all of a sudden 15 years later, Red Bull comes along attached to the Rubik's brand and is out of the way nerves. This is the real one.

So apparently, there was a lot of controversy like you were saying, but now they kind of coexist and the Red Bull Rubik's sponsored one changed their name from World Championship to World Cup so that they don't step on each other's feet at all. But if you think about it, that's a pretty big win for this grassroots World Cubing Association to be able to keep their original name and not have to change their name. For sure. Hats off to them. Hats off indeed.

So one of the things that I said about the Rubik's Cube Chuck is that it's got a lot of layers to it and there's a lot of surprising math involved. Specifically there's a kind of algebra called group theory and one of the things that has long kind of fascinated mathematicians is that there is somewhere in there, a number of moves, there's an algorithm that has, or there's a number of moves associated with any number of algorithms, man I'm making this way harder than it actually is, where it represents the maximum number of moves you would need to use to solve any configuration, any of the 43 quintillion configurations of a Rubik's Cube.

And some people figured out that this number must exist and brother, they got obsessed with it. From 1981 to 2010, some people almost set a building full of Rubik's Cubes on fire. Yeah, I mean they really researched this stuff to the point where like computer scientists are looking into this. There was a guy named Thomas Rakiki who got the upper limit down to 22 moves and this is like Google is helping them out with the processing power. So they call it God's algorithm, in the case of Rubik's Cube, they got down to 20 is where

they landed, right? But God's algorithm can be used for any puzzle really and that is, and why do they call it God's algorithm? It's how God would solve the puzzle. So from what I saw, it's God's number is that the maximum number of moves that God would require to solve any configuration of the puzzle. Right. So they call it God's number.

Got a little confusing in this article because it's a bit of a brain trick. It's like the fewest moves, but it's a maximum number of moves. Right, right, exactly. It's hard to wrap your mind around. And then there's actually fewer moves for other algorithms. So I saw God's number is actually probably more like somewhere between 19 and 20, but because there are algorithms out there that have to be done in no less than 20 moves, that's still God's number.

And there's also the devil's number I saw too, which is the number of moves in an algorithm that it would take to go through all 43 plus quintillion configurations before you solve it. Which I think that's a pretty good name for that one. Yeah, now that's the one that they're on the trail of now. But they're done at 20, right? They are, but I think it's interesting that we're not entirely certain. It's not like, okay, this has been proven, it's done.

The reason why they arrived at 20 is because they actually built an algorithm to try to solve these algorithms. They taught in AI basically how to play Rubik's Cube, or they said, here's a Rubik's Cube, go teach yourself. And then they had it play just some mind-numbing number of different Rubik's Cube's hands trying to solve it. And it kept coming up with 20. And so it came up with 20 enough times that they're like, well, our computer God has told

us that 20 is God's number. So there you have it. But no one, it wasn't proven, it wasn't solved. It was just like this thing is so smart that we're just going to go with 20. So pit someone still working on it then probably. I guess, but I think I get the impression that they have moved on to the devil's number. So as you would imagine with the toy of this caliber, there were bound to be other people saying they invented it and patent battles would ensue.

And of course, this was the case with the Rubik's Cube. In 1977, when Rubik got his Hungarian patent for the Magic Cube, there was another inventor named Larry Nichols, who had already patented something very similar in the US. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, this was in 1972, but his was for a two by two by two cube, not a three by three by three. Still. Same concept.

Sure. And at first he was like, this is, this is hilarious. You know, I had the same idea and now it's become a national craze. It's kind of satisfying. And somebody said, do you have any idea how much money you are losing out on right now? You should sue. He said, oh my gosh, you're right, I should sue. And I get the impression that either the company he worked for or the company he sold the patent

to really led the charge in suing for this patent infringement. But he had a pretty good case. I mean, he had invented it and patented it years before. It was just the number of cubes involved was smaller. Yeah. I mean, there was another guy too. A guy named Frank, Frank Fox, I think in 74, he actually did the three by three by three. But he let his patent lapse, whereas Nichols did not.

And those people like you were talking about that he that actually owned Nichols patent and were called Moleculin Research Corporation. That sounds scary. Yeah. And litigious. Yeah, they do. So I want to point out though, it's definitely worth saying outright, there is no evidence and I don't think anyone's ever leveled in accusation that Erno Rubik stole this idea.

It was just arrived at independently and he was working behind the iron curtain at the time too. So the chances of any exposure are pretty low. It was just some people kind of came up with the same idea at the same time and Erno Rubik's is the one that hit. That's right. In 1984, a federal district court ruled in favor of Moleculin, but then in 86, an appeals court overturned that saying only that two by two by two Rubik's cube because they started

making different variations. They made a smaller one that they said infringed. In fact, I remember now, I had a little guy on a car key for a short time. Oh yeah, I remember those. I'm not mistaken, but then in 1989, another appeals court upheld the previous appeals court decision. I should say, I read an article by that guy, Nichols, who had the original patent and they were like, I think they were suing for like 50 million or something and they were, were

you satisfied with the outcome? He said, yeah, I was satisfied. He's like, I got enough to put both of my kids through Harvard, so I'm pretty happy with that. He invented this thing that he was able to send his kid through Harvard with. Yeah. That's always interesting when someone wins something like that, but it wasn't like stolen from him.

Right. It was just, he had the patent first and they agreed. You know what's even crazier that makes that story just absolutely insane. He had approached ideal toys with that and they had not bought it and then they went on years later to buy the, the, er, Rubik version. Yeah. They put out a bunch of difference. They made big ones, like the tiny ones I just talked about.

I remember I had a snake. I did too. And I had no idea what to do with that. I just played with it like it was a snake. I did the same thing. Yeah. I just twisted it around and stuff. I still don't know what you were supposed to do with that thing.

I think eventually the snake would be put together in some sort of a three dimensional octagon or something if I remember. Okay. That was fun. Yeah. I was way off. But yeah, I didn't know how to, I didn't even try to learn. I just kind of played with it.

I taught mine to drink water. Mine drinks from a cup. That's right. That was very Ralph Wiggum. Yeah. Erno Rubik is still alive and well. He lives in Hungary. He still teaches architecture.

I imagine has a boatload of money. So he's founded some multiple foundations for inventors. That's very cool. Yeah, he has a boatload of money so much so that his success story is considered by some to have been the thing that opened the gates to capitalism in Hungary. Amazing. They also made him the president of the Hungarian Engineering Academy and he still I think shows up once in a while to the world championships and maybe the World Cup.

I don't know. He doesn't seem like a very controversial type. No. Seems like a good guy. I really want to go crazy if you've solved a ton of Rubik's cubes, but this has kind of made you nostalgic to try something harder. They make a 13 by 13 by 13 Rubik's cube and there's something else called the Skube S-K-E-W-B and it is, I don't even know what you're supposed to do with it.

It's like the snake times a trillion to me. That's right. And there's also a movie called Cube which is like saw with math. Oh, I saw that. Yeah. Yeah. And there's the pursuit of happiness where Will Smith gets a job as a stockbroker because somebody sees him solve a Rubik's cube in something like two minutes or less.

And apparently while he was promoting that movie, he solved one in less than a minute himself in real life. You mean the movie, the pursuit of hapiness? Yeah. Did they explain that in the movie? I'm sure. I never saw it. I just always called it hapiness.

Did you ever see that one where he was like super depressed and his colleagues at work like just gaslight him into thinking he's being visited by angels? No, I didn't. Did you see the one where he went, he was from West Philadelphia and he went to live with his rich relatives? Yeah, I did. As a matter of fact, he dressed very colorfully. He was, I think in Bel Air.

What was the Bel Air? I think it was Santa Barbara. Oh, you're right. Well, if you want to know more about Will Smith, you can type his name into the search bar at housestuffworks.com and since I said Will Smith, it's time for Listener Mail. I've got a coconut tree correction. Okay. Hey guys, correction on something said during the episode, The Cult of the Coconut, when

you guys talked about the Culp of Rishka. First of all, it's not pronounced that way. It is pronounced Culp of Rishka. Oh, we were way off. All right. She says Rishka or Rishka, depending on transliteration, simply means tree in Sanskrit. Okay. Also, always mispronounced by people in the West, by the way.

Oh, well, I don't feel that bad. Yeah, exactly. Correct pronunciation is soundskrut, no, she's saying Sanskrit is always mispronounced. Oh, oh, I see. So it's soundskrut. Soundskrut. That sounds like a French person. As best I can convey is what she says.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. I've always said Sanskrit. This person is a real, really into words though, and very smart. Okay. Second, the coconut tree is just one of the trees considered a, how do you pronounce it again?

Kalashkrut. Culp. Culp. Culp. Culp. Culp. Culp. Because it is all you need to survive though, but because every single part of the coconut

tree is useful to humans. Oh, yeah. The bark, the leaves, the fibers, and of course the coconuts in their entirety. This concept is tied closely with why Indians culturally revere certain animals, e.g. cow, and plants and trees, e.g. banyan and coconut. Okay. I've noticed on the podcast how you two often go out of your way to correctly pronounce words or names in foreign languages like German.

I thought we were. Which is something I appreciate as a bicultural, pentalingual individual. Perhaps you could expand your efforts to include not just Western languages, but Eastern languages too. After all, Sanskrit belongs to the same language group as German. If you think about it, I think it would be true to the spirit of your show, guys. Keep up the good work. And that is from Ruta, R-U-T-A.

Did Ruta say, did she sign off with later Lemos? No. Thanks a lot, Ruta. Yeah, it's not like we're like, oh, we'll only go to the trouble of pronouncing something in German or French, which by the way, we don't very often, and we thought we were pronouncing it correctly in the Eastern languages. So sorry, Ruta. I didn't know what's saying.

It's Sanskrit. I had no idea. Not just us, Chuck, like a million people just learned that. Yeah. Close to a million. I agree. Well, thanks a lot again, Ruta. And if you want to get in touch with us like Ruta did, you can go to StuffYouShouldKnow.com

and check out our social links, or you can send us a good old-fashioned email to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Shatikular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the

White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.