Rubik's Cube
By Gilad Chen
Why is Rubik's cube so hard to solve?
As we all know the Rubik's cube is and an endless frustration and we can all agree that it's not easy to solve it. Well let's break the problem and explain why it's so hard.
When you pick up a Rubik's cube you might think how many combinations there are:
500?
2000?
1,000,000?
1,000,000,000?
Well the answer is a lot bigger and it might be surprising but there are exactly 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 combinations.
But what is 43 quintillion?
Well let me put it this way:
If you drew every combination on a paper and stacked them, you could go to Pluto, come back to Earth and you wouldn't be even half way!
Here is another way to put it:
Let's assume that you can draw a permutation in an average time of 45 seconds, then it would take 61.718 trillion years to draw each one of the permutations... more time than the age of the universe.
And you could say that is why Rubik's cube is so hard, but from a solved cube you could not get to every combination. The truth is that if you twist a conor once, you get a whole new universe of combinations. So let's assume that you can get 500 combinations from a solved cube, you could get another 500 if you twist a conor.
Another fun fact:
To solve Rubik's cube, people started to write down combinations of moves that would get you further to solving the cube so they wouldn't forget.
These are called algorithms so this is how we cubers write them:
R = turn the right face clock wise
R'=turn the right face counter-clock wise
And basically the pattern keeps moving like L is left D is down B is back U is up till it ends
You could even write cube rotations (example: moving the cube to the left side).