The Rubik's Cube, that maddening, frustration bit of 70s puzzle kitsch, is being celebrated on its 40th anniversary with a multi-million-dollar exhibition.
The cube's inventor, Hungarian architect and sculptor Erno Rubik, is in the United States for the launch of the exhibition in Jersey City, N.J.
Opening at the city's Liberty Science center and created in partnership with search giant Google, "Beyond the Rubik's Cube" is a 7,000-square foot interactive celebration of all things cube, an acknowledgement of its enduring if frustrating allure.
You say you're one of those people who never, ever figures out how to solve it? Don't feel too bad, its designer says.
"To solve it independently is a really hard task, partly because (people) don't have enough patience," Erno Rubik told USA Today.
Although, he admits, it might be a bit easier these days, as there's a vibrant cube "community" willing to help.
"Nowadays, it's different than when it was introduced. You can learn it; you can find lots of things on the Internet," he says. "The combined power of the mind is much stronger than individual ones."
Highlights of the cube exhibition include a fully working 18-carat gold version reportedly worth $2.5 million and a robotic cube-solver.
The robot is no match for humans, as a number of so-called "speed cubers" will be showing their skills at the exhibition, solving the cube in less than a third of the robot's time of around a minute.
In 1974, Rubik was teaching architecture to undergraduate students in Budapest, and came up with this cube as a teaching aid to highlight structural problems in architectural design.
He never thought it would become such as phenomenon.
"I had a feeling about the intellectual value of the cube" at the start, he says, but adds he thought it would be hard to sell as a toy.
History has shown otherwise, says Paul Hoffman, president of the Liberty Science Center.
"It may be the world's best-selling toy,'' he says, with as many as 2.5 million cubes made, although that figure would include the massive number of counterfeits capitalizing on the success of the original, for which Erno Rubik was awarded a patent.
"They've seized whole 747s full of illegal knockoffs," he says.
The next time you try your hand at solving one, be aware experts calculate that no matter how much a Rubik's Cube is scrambled it can be solved with just 20 moves. If that's any comfort to you, that is, since there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different combinations the cube can be turned and twisted through.
