The world's favorite toy turns four decades today and Google is paying homage with a cool new animation on its homepage.
The Rubik's Cube was invented on May 19, 1974 by Hungarian architect and professor Ernő Rubik originally as a mobile sculpture to help demonstrate spatial relationships to his students. The original cube was made of plastic, with each face having a different color: red, yellow, orange, green, blue and white.
"Most of my adult life I spent with the cube because I was only 30 (years old) when I created it. And right now, after 40 years, I can say I know the cube. I know what happened around the cube," says [video] Rubik in an interview with Reuters.
Today, Google has a digital version of the Rubik's Cube which, is of course, interactive. The cube is first shown with a basic Google logo, but it becomes a full-colored playable Rubik's Cube when you click on it. You can twist the rows horizontally and vertically by dragging the tiles. You can also rotate the entire cube in different directions by clicking outside the cube. This way, the animation becomes fully playable. It even shows a number at the bottom left of the cube to tell you how many moves you've made.
The mechanics of the Rubik's Cube puzzle is simple enough. Each of the cube's six faces is made of nine separate squares with stickers indicating its color. Each row or column attaches to the center of the cube through an internal pivot, which means you can move the small cubes around and mix up the colors. Your goal is to put each square back to its original position so that each face only has one color.
As simple as it may sound, it's not that easy to solve a Rubik's Cube. Rubik himself took more than a month solving his own invention. There are more than 43 quintillion (or 43 followed by 18 zeroes) unique configurations of the Rubik's Cube, although Google only uses one. That means it shouldn't take you the entire day playing on Google Doodle. The last time Google paid tribute to another game; it was for Pac-Man and players reportedly 4.9 million hours eating pac-dots and pellets. Logically, a Rubik's Cube can be solved in just 20 minutes, though.
That's not impossible. In 1992, during the first Rubik's Cube competition, the champion solved the puzzle in just 22.95 seconds; while the fastest time it took for a human to solve the cube is only 5.55 seconds. Robots have also attempted to demystify the cube. The Cubestormer 3, which runs on an ARM processor, broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to solve the Rubik's Cube, clocking in at an impossibly fast speed of 3.253 seconds.
While the Rubik's cube was invented in 1974, it wasn't until 1980 that the toy became widely popular when it was named Toy of the Year in Britain. The Ideal Toy Corp. has acquired license to the toy and has sold more than 350 million cubes since then.
