University Daily Kansan, January 15, 1982
Page 3
Rubik's Cube provides challenging frustration
By BARB EHLL Staff Reporter
Staff Reporter
It was originally intended to illustrate spatial geometry, but Rubik's Cube's 43 million patterns have sparked a fascinating, frustrating fad.
Comedian Steve Martin, for instance, revealed his solution to Rubik's Cube on the Tonight Show. He maneuled it and it飞 scattered on the floor—in 12 seconds.
It seems to frustrate adults more than children.
Others haven't solved it so quickly.
Lisa Nice, Mission sophomore, said recently that her dad had been struggling with its since Thanksgiving.
ACCORDING TO NICE, her dad spends about a half hour each night working with the cube. She said it's like needlework. It gives him something to do.
For Christmas, she bought him two books on how to solve the cube, and another book titled "101 Uses for a Dead Rubik's Cube." He's refused to read the book until he's solved the puzzle.
Nice said she thought that someone who was a 'trouble-shooter or someone who works with engineering or com- p would be interested in the puzzle.
Paul Conrad, professor of mathematics, doesn't view Rubik's Cube as the mathematical tool some books have claimed it is.
"Most of the kids that are good at it don't know math," he said.
Although Conrad has never tried to solve a cube and has never read a book on it, he said it was a "fascinating thing, not mathematical."
FOR THOSE WHO are unfamiliar with it, the Rubik's Cube connects 27 cubes, with the six center pieces connected by spring-loaded spindles. Eight cubes and seven connectors connected by plastic flanges or rims allow it to turn without falling apart.
It was first marketed in Europe in 1978 under the name Navos Kocka, or Hungarian Magic Cube. Twenty-nine-year-old Profer Erno Rubik of the School of Commercial Artists in Budapest invented it as a teaching aid to illustrate to his students the laws of mathematical symmetry.
By 1980, its popularity spread to the United States. It now appears in a variety of shapes and sizes. There are triangles, spheres, octagons and truncated Rubiks. There are Rubik's Cubes on key chains—although it's not recommended that the puzzle be solved while driving and necklaces. There are even T-shirts with the saying, "I am going through cuberty."
Judging by the books around town, there are at least three people in the United States who know how to solve the cube. All three have written solution notes on the front cover of the Oread Bookstore, and a similar book is sold in the Kansas University Bookstore.
For $2.95, the secrets of how to "Conquer That Cube" are revealed. This book is color coded and has a section that describes how to deal with the cube's several different shapes. It turns the cube's solution in seven stages.
**ANOTHER BOOK available at the Oread Bookstore is "Mastering the Rubik's Cube." It solves the cube layer and includes some fun-facts to know-know-and-del.**
"The Simple Solution to Rubik's Cube" is comparable to "Mastering the Rubik's Cube" in both price and explanation. For $1.95, it tells short cuts, error corrections and warns that corrections may be hazardous to your sanity.
Bill Getz, an employee at the Oread Bookstore, said he had some friends who were able to solve the cube without the book.
"How many people get the book and the cube and still can't solve it?" Getz asked.
Getz said that he had heard sociological explanations that the cube was useful in developing conceptual formatting, but he said he had his doubts.
is similar to the cube in structure. It's not limited to one solution but it can form different shapes, And, of course, there are little books on how to charm the cake.
"It caught on because of a recur- need for a hula hoop," he said. The Town Crier has reordered several times on Rubik's石, which
Jane Lages, Springfield, Mo., sophomore, received a cube for her birthday in November. Like many other people, she is a victim of cube
craze—not unlike pac-man fever—which can, as the song goes, drive you crazy.
"I just turn it. I don't think about the mathematics at all," she said, "I just look at it and try to figure out what to do next."
a whiz-kid at the cube. He figured out how to do it on his own and when Lages complained about it not moving easily, he fixed it for her.
She said her 15-year-old brother was
"He took it apart and put Vaselin in it. I guess he got it in his mind somewhere that it would move more easily if it put Vaselin in it." Larges
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