Google Doodle celebrates invention of the Rubik's Cube

Every kid born in and around the 90s remembers the day they discovered the Rubik’s Cube. And today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 40 year anniversary of the invention of this demonic - er, much loved toy by animating it.

 

Google first displays the cube performing a simple loop, with a basic version of the company's logo showing up in coloured squares on a white cube. You can click on cube to start playing, using your mouse to rotate the rows and columns horizontally and vertically, just as you would with the physical toy. Except you can’t fling this one across the room in sheer frustration.

 

Appealing to children with its bright colours and solid, dependable shape, the Rubik’s Cube emanates innocence and playability. But with over 43 quintillion unique permutations of the 54 coloured squares over the six faces, the Cube is nothing more than a tiny geometric Satan.

 

Invented by Hungarian architect Erno Rubik in 1974, the Cube was licensed to the Ideal Toy Corp in 1980, and has sold over 350,000 units since, making it the biggest-selling toy of all time. But when Rubik invented his cube, in order to demonstrate three-dimensional geometry, he had little idea how to solve it. In fact, it took him a month before he was able to solve it for himself.

 

Today, over 1,700 Rubik’s Cube competitions have taken place in 66 countries since the 2004 founding of the World Cube Association, a governing body modeled after FIFA.

 

For those with the patience to stick it out, the World Cube Association holds numerous ‘speedcubing’ contests, including a World Championship that offers $3000 to the winner. It requires competitors to attempt five solves, the best and worst of which are eliminated, and the other three times are averaged to make sure that nothing is decided by chance. Before each solve, puzzles are scrambled according to a computer program, to ensure that all competitors begin from the same positions.

 

Just remember that the fastest time it has taken for a human to solve the puzzle is 5.55 seconds. That’s the time to beat.