{"id":823,"date":"2014-05-20T14:23:06","date_gmt":"2014-05-20T06:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/rubiks-cubes\/"},"modified":"2024-02-16T21:11:55","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T13:11:55","slug":"rubiks-cubes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/rubiks-cubes\/","title":{"rendered":"Rubik&#8217;s Cubes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>[This is a back-issue of one of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/newsletter\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this site&#8217;s newsletters<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As Google may have already told you, this week marks the 40th anniversary of invention of Erno Rubik&#8217;s famous cube.<\/p>\n<p>Many people find the cube horribly difficult to solve. If you&#8217;re one of those people, take heart in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zazzle.com\/i_found_one_i_can_solve_skate_deck-186230980551223058?pt=tshirt-235248515408208769&amp;rf=238864103946172797\">this<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UkBr4xmBUzo&amp;list=PLEFF895C638F46B52&amp;feature=share\">this<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Some mathematical thoughts on the cube, summarised from a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.therubikzone.com\">Rubik&#8217;s Cube website<\/a> I made a long time ago:<\/p>\n<p>When the cube first came out, it was marketed with the slogan &#8220;more than 3 billion combinations!&#8221; Since the cube actually has over 43 <em>billion<\/em> billion combinations, that&#8217;s like MacDonalds boasting &#8220;Over a hundred burgers sold!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The number of combinations is mindbogglingly big. Perhaps this will help you wrap your head around it.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Suppose you got a cube, and messed it up, completely randomly scrambling it. Then you sent this scrambled cube to someone.<\/li>\n<li>Suppose you kept doing this, sending scrambled cubes to different people.<\/li>\n<li>Suppose you kept this up, until you&#8217;d sent a cube to ever man, woman and child on earth.<\/li>\n<li>Suppose you persuaded everyone else on earth to do the same, so that everyone on the whole planet was sending and receiving billions and billions of cubes through the mail.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After all that, there&#8217;d be a bit less than an even chance that <strong>one<\/strong> of those cubes would arrive at its destination solved, purely by chance.<\/p>\n<p>To dispose of these cubes, we could send them into space, where they&#8217;d form a Rubik&#8217;s cube moon, about 250km (150 miles) across.<\/p>\n<p>Ok, that&#8217;s enough about Rubik&#8217;s cubes. The next video in my series of ruler-and-compass constructions is this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NECjlQYjo4s\">construction of a hexagon<\/a>. The hexagon is easy to construct with a compass and straightedge, and therefore makes a nice introduction tot he topic. It&#8217;s also much easier than solving a Rubik&#8217;s cube!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[This is a back-issue of one of this site&#8217;s newsletters] As Google may have already told you, this week marks the 40th anniversary of invention of Erno Rubik&#8217;s famous cube. Many people find the cube horribly difficult to solve. If you&#8217;re one of those people, take heart in this or this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[153],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1290,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823\/revisions\/1290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}