Rubik 39;s Official Cube App Fixed Download
Charles Holley
The Rubik's Cube is a 3-D combination puzzle invented in 1974[2][3] by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. Originally called the Magic Cube,[4] the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Pentangle Puzzles in the UK in 1978,[5] and then by Ideal Toy Corp in 1980[6] via businessman Tibor Laczi and Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer.[7] The cube was released internationally in 1980 and became one of the most recognized icons in popular culture. It won the 1980 German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle. As of March 2021[update], over 450 million cubes had been sold worldwide,[8][9][needs update] making it the world's bestselling puzzle game[10][11] and bestselling toy.[12] The Rubik's Cube was inducted into the US National Toy Hall of Fame in 2014.[13]
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. Some later versions of the cube have been updated to use coloured plastic panels instead, which prevents peeling and fading.[14] Since 1988, the arrangement of colours has been standardised with white opposite yellow, blue opposite green, and orange opposite red, and the red, white, and blue arranged clockwise in that order.[15] On early cubes, the position of the colours varied from cube to cube.[16]
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 practise it and similar puzzles, and compete for the fastest times in various categories. Since 2003, the World Cube Association (WCA), the international governing body of the Rubik's Cube, has organised competitions worldwide and recognises world records.
In March 1970, Larry D. Nichols invented a 222 "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.
After the first batches of Rubik's Cubes were released in May 1980, initial sales were modest, but Ideal began a television advertising campaign in the middle of the year which it supplemented with newspaper advertisements.[23] At the end of 1980, Rubik's Cube won a German Game of the Year special award[24] and won similar awards for best toy in the UK, France, and the US.[25] By 1981, Rubik's Cube had become a craze, and it is estimated that in the period from 1980 to 1983 around 200 million Rubik's Cubes were sold worldwide.[26] In March 1981, a speedcubing championship organised by the Guinness Book of World Records was held in Munich,[24] and a Rubik's Cube was depicted on the front cover of Scientific American that same month.[27] In June 1981, The Washington Post reported that Rubik's Cube is "a puzzle that's moving like fast food right now ... this year's Hoola Hoop or Bongo Board",[28] and by September 1981, New Scientist noted that the cube had "captivated the attention of children of ages from 7 to 70 all over the world this summer."[29]
As most people could solve only one or two sides, numerous books were published including David Singmaster's Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" (1980) and Patrick Bossert's You Can Do the Cube (1981).[24] At one stage in 1981, three of the top ten best selling books in the US were books on solving Rubik's Cube,[30] and the best-selling book of 1981 was James G. Nourse's The Simple Solution to Rubik's Cube which sold over 6 million copies.[31] In 1981, the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited a Rubik's Cube, and at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee a six-foot Cube was put on display.[24] ABC Television even developed a cartoon show called Rubik, the Amazing Cube.[32] In June 1982, the First Rubik's Cube World Championship took place in Budapest and would become the only competition recognized as official until the championship was revived in 2003.[33]
Rubik's Cubes continued to be marketed and sold throughout the 1980s and 1990s,[24] but it was not until the early 2000s that interest in the Cube began increasing again.[37] In the US, sales doubled between 2001 and 2003, and The Boston Globe remarked that it was "becoming cool to own a Cube again".[38] The 2003 World Rubik's Games Championship was the first speedcubing tournament since 1982.[37] It was held in Toronto and was attended by 83 participants.[37] The tournament led to the formation of the World Cube Association in 2004.[37] Annual sales of Rubik branded cubes were said to have reached 15 million worldwide in 2008.[39] Part of the new appeal was ascribed to the advent of Internet video sites, such as YouTube, which allowed fans to share their solving strategies.[39] Following the expiration of Rubik's patent in 2000, other brands of cubes appeared, especially from Chinese companies.[40] Many of these Chinese branded cubes have been engineered for speed and are favoured by speedcubers.[40] On 27 October 2020, Spin Master said it will pay $50 million to buy the Rubik's Cube brand.[1]
Taking advantage of an initial shortage of cubes, many imitations and variations appeared, many of which may have violated one or more patents. In 2000 the patents expired, and since then, many Chinese companies have produced copies, modifications, and improvements upon the Rubik and V-Cube designs.[40]
Each of the six centre pieces pivots on a fastener held by the centre piece, a "3D cross". A spring between each fastner and its corresponding piece tensions the piece inward, so that collectively, the whole assembly remains compact but can still be easily manipulated. The older versions of the official Cube used a screw that can be tightened or loosened to change the "feel" of the Cube. Newer official Rubik's brand cubes have rivets instead of screws and cannot be adjusted. Inexpensive clones do not have screws or springs, all they have is a plastic clip to keep the centre piece in place and freely rotate.
The Cube can be taken apart without much difficulty, typically by rotating the top layer by 45 and then prying one of its edge cubes away from the other two layers. Consequently, it is a simple process to "solve" a Cube by taking it apart and reassembling it in a solved state.
There are six central pieces that show one coloured face, twelve edge pieces that show two coloured faces, and eight corner pieces that show three coloured faces. Each piece shows a unique colour combination, but not all combinations are present (for example, if red and orange are on opposite sides of the solved Cube, there is no edge piece with both red and orange sides). The location of these cubes relative to one another can be altered by twisting an outer third of the Cube by increments of 90 degrees, but the location of the coloured sides relative to one another in the completed state of the puzzle cannot be altered; it is fixed by the relative positions of the centre squares. However, Cubes with alternative colour arrangements also exist; for example, with the yellow face opposite the green, the blue face opposite the white, and red and orange remaining opposite each other.
The original (333) Rubik's Cube has eight corners and twelve edges. There are 8! (40,320) ways to arrange the corner cubes. Each corner has three possible orientations, although only seven (of eight) can be oriented independently; the orientation of the eighth (final) corner depends on the preceding seven, giving 37 (2,187) possibilities. There are 12!/2 (239,500,800) ways to arrange the edges, restricted from 12! because edges must be in an even permutation exactly when the corners are. (When arrangements of centres are also permitted, as described below, the rule is that the combined arrangement of corners, edges, and centres must be an even permutation.) Eleven edges can be flipped independently, with the flip of the twelfth depending on the preceding ones, giving 211 (2,048) possibilities.[52]
The preceding figure is limited to permutations that can be reached solely by turning the sides of the cube. If one considers permutations reached through disassembly of the cube, the number becomes twelve times larger:
which is approximately 519 quintillion[53] possible arrangements of the pieces that make up the cube, but only one in twelve of these are actually solvable. This is because there is no sequence of moves that will swap a single pair of pieces or rotate a single corner or edge cube. Thus, there are 12 possible sets of reachable configurations, sometimes called "universes" or "orbits", into which the cube can be placed by dismantling and reassembling it.
The preceding numbers assume the centre faces are in a fixed position. If one considers turning the whole cube to be a different permutation, then each of the preceding numbers should be multiplied by 24. A chosen colour can be on one of six sides, and then one of the adjacent colours can be in one of four positions; this determines the positions of all remaining colours.
The original Rubik's Cube had no orientation markings on the centre faces (although some carried the "Rubik's Cube" mark on the centre square of the white face), and therefore solving it does not require any attention to orienting those faces correctly. However, with marker pens, one could, for example, mark the central squares of an unscrambled Cube with four coloured marks on each edge, each corresponding to the colour of the adjacent face; a cube marked in this way is referred to as a "supercube". Some Cubes have also been produced commercially with markings on all of the squares, such as the Lo Shu magic square or playing card suits. Cubes have also been produced where the nine stickers on a face are used to make a single larger picture, and centre orientation matters on these as well. Thus one can nominally solve a Cube yet have the markings on the centres rotated; it then becomes an additional test to solve the centres as well.
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