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TITLE: The
Perplexing Life of Erno Rubik
AUTHOR: Family Media
Inc.
SOURCE: Discover
DATE: March 1986 v7 p81(8))
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''We turn the Cube
and it twists us.'' --Rubik
Eleven years after his inspiration, here was the first
great tangible reward. Erno Rubik was moving out of
his father's house and renovating one for himself and
his family. But he didn't smile once during the tour
he gave me on a grey morning in Budapest. Maybe any
good citizen of the Hungarian People's Republic, walking
through the spacious old stucco building, would have
been disconcerted by the bourgeois touches the workmen
were adding: a three-car garage (with a Mercedes-Benz
already parked inside), a glass- enclosed porch with
a pleasant view of the front garden, a remodeled kitchen,
an entirely new upper floor for the two children, an
office for Rubik, a sauna and swimming pool in the basement--not
a bad imitation of a villa in the decadent West. Except
for one feature.
''Where's the dining room?'' I asked.
''I eliminated that. We'll eat right there,'' Rubik
said, pointing to a corner of the kitchen.
''Do you plan to have many people over to dinner?''
Rubik puffed on a Marlboro 100, gazed out at the walled
yard in back, and frowned. ''I hope not.''
In Budapest there are two schools of thought about Ru
bik. One is that the Cube has turned him into a taciturn,
suspicious, friendless man--and, really, who could blame
him? One moment he's a professor of design who makes
$150 a month and has never been outside the Iron Curtain;
the next he's the richest and most famous man in Hungary,
beset by money-grubbing communists and capitalists alike.
The toy he built in his room in his mother's apartment
has perplexed maybe 500 million people. Socialist millionaire,
tormentor of one-eighth of humanity--it would be a strain
on anyone.
The other school of thought is that Rubik was a taciturn,
suspicious loner long before he invented the Cube. Maybe
one would have to be this sort to invent the Cube.
Rubik himself, naturally, prefers not to discuss either
theory.
Each morning I stopped by his design studio I found
him smoking and loking as if it had been a rough night.
His hair was disheveled, his eyes were half closed,
his head slumped. My questions only seemed to make him
more uncomfortable. ''It's very hard to say the truth,''
he admitted. ''Usually we are saying only part of the
truth.'' He didn't mind explaining how he built and
then learned to solve the Cube-- there the truth was
easy enough to say. The real puzzle was what happened
afterward.
Any modern marketer could have told him why the Cube
would fail.It was put out by socialist bureaucrats who
didn't know how to sell it in the first place, and who
then made a grand mess of things when it became popular
anyway. The Cube's excruciating complexity (it has one
correct alignment and 43 quintillion* wrong ones) violated
that basic tenet of modern capitalism: no one ever goes
broke underestimating the intelligence of the public.
It also violated the toy industry's standards: it didn't
talk, whistle, cry, shoot, change clothes, appear in
a movie, or require batteries.
Yet it became the fastest- selling toy in the world
and probablythe most popular puzzle in history. It amused
five-year-olds and inspired mathematicians. It was blamed
for divorces. There were imitations, songs, and a plastic
hammer called the Cube Smasher (''to beat it into 43
quintillion pieces''). Saturday Night Live did a commercial
for Rubik's Grenade (whose colors had to be aligned
in ten seconds or else). At one point, books about the
Cube (there've been more than a hundred, in at least
a dozen languages) simultaneously occupied the Nos.
1, 2, and 4 spots on the New York Times paperback best-seller
lists. Until recently you could find the Cube on Saturday
morning television (on a cartoon show called Rubik the
Amazing Cube). Even today, with the craze over, it's
still used in college math classes dealing with group
theory.
And it currently has the title role in a controversial
play in Budapest that uses Rubik's in- vention as a
paradigm for the failure of socialist economies to innovate.
I never could stand the thing myself--I gave up after
ten minutes--but if I had to pick one artifact of this
century that will still be produced, unaltered, 2,000
years from now, I'd bet on the Cube. It's not only a
timeless puzzle, but also a marvelous object to hold.
I can't imagine how anyone could improve the design.
The way those 26 little blocks of plastic are held together
is as beautifully clever as the puzzle itself. The ancient
Greeks considered the cube one of the spe- cial Platonic
solids because its sides are identical. (There are only
four other regular polyhe- dra, with 4, 8, 12, and 20
sides.) I wonder if some day puzzle makers will refer
to especially elegant creations as Rubikian puzzles.
Of course, there may never be another puzzle like the
Cube, which is perhaps one more reason why Rubik, who's
41 and still designing toys, seems unhappy these days.
''In its arranged state it suggests calm, peace, a sense
of order, security . . . in sharp contrast to all that
the work- ing object means once it is brought to life,
to motion. There is something terrifying in its calm
state, like a wild beast at rest, a tiger in repose,
its power lurking.''
--Rubik
This animal was first glimpsed in the spring of 1974.
There was no reason it couldn't have been built centuries
earlier, nor was there any reason for Rubik to stack
some blocks of wood and attach them to one another with
elastic strings.
He started twisting one layer of blocks at a time, and
soon camethe dramatic result. The
wild beast--more precisely, the elastic band--snapped.
Why, at the age of 29, was he playing with blocks? Why
did he keep playing with them even after the elastic
broke?
Rubik has tried to come up with an answer. He's given
hundreds of interviews, made speeches, even written
a 279- page manuscript in English called ''Rubik on
Rubik'' (which he has allowed me to quote). It's unpublished--Rubik
says he hasn't had time to make the revisions requested
by his American publisher, and he has some doubts whether
the public really wants to read his autobiography anyway.
(I tried to assure him that such qualms no longer trouble
any celebrity or publisher in America.) Rubik's memoirs
aren't unlike the Cube: highly abstract, often tedious,
yet in their own way engaging and revealing. I had a
hard time believing Rubik when he told me he couldn't
think of any colleagues or acquaintances who knew him
well. (''It's very, very hard to find me as a person,''
he warned.) But it seemed more believable after reading
about his unhappy days as an art student (''I was somewhat
out of place among my classmates; I could not be as
bohemian as they were''), about his hobbies (solo kayaking
on the Danube, solving chess puzzles), and about Renni,
the stray Irish setter that became ''the best friend
I ever had.''
Rubik was born in the air- raid shelter of a Budapest
hospital during World War II. His mother was a published
poet, his father a renowned aircraft engineer who started
a company to build gliders. When Ru bik was in college
they divorced. (''The waves surged high but they did
not reach me,'' he wrote of that event.) Rubik describes
himself as an above-average, unenthusiastic pupil all
the way through his college classes in sculpture.
After graduating he went back to learn architecture
at a small college called the Academy of Applied Arts
and Design. He remained there as a professor, teaching
interior design and generally keeping to himself.
A colleague remembers him as
''a bit sour.''
Many of the early stories about the Cube related that
it was built to teach Rubik's students how to ''deal
with three-dimensional objects.'' I never understood
what this meant, much less how the Cube could teach
it. The mystery was cleared up after I arrived in Budapest.
At the Academy they chuckled at the thought of using
the Cube in class, and Ru bik dismissed the idea. Yes,
he had shown the Cube to his students, but he hadn't
built it for them. He built it because he was a designer
who likes playing with geometric shapes. His room in
his mother's two-bedroom apartment was already filled
with various cardboard and wooden figures the spring
day he attached the elastic strings to the wooden blocks.
Although his real interest was the structural problem--how
could the blocks move in- dependently without falling
apart?--he couldn't help noticing the way they rearranged
themselves as he twisted. By the time the elastic broke
he was hooked. But he needed something else to hold
the blocks together.
The solution was a brilliantly simple bit of engineering:
have the blocks hold themselves together. Rubik painstakingly
cut and sanded the little blocks (known today as ''cubies''),
assembled them, marked each side of the Cube with adhesive
paper of a different color, and started twisting.
''It was wonderful,'' he wrote, ''to see how, after
only a few turns, the colors became mixed, apparently
in random fashion. It was tremendously satisfying to
watch this color parade. Like after a nice walk when
you have seen many lovely sights you decide to go home,
after a while I decided it was time to go home, let
us put the cubes back in order. And it was at that moment
that I came face to face with the Big Challenge: What
is the way home?''
Half a billion people can imagine--and relish--what
hapened next.
He twisted and twisted, and the colors only got more
scrambled. It was like ''staring at a piece of writing
written in a secret code. But for me, it was a code
I myself had invented! Yet I could not read it. This
was such an extraordinary situation that I simply could
not accept it.''
Rubik was in even worse shape than his disciples. He
didn't knowif the problem could be solved. Perhaps there
was only one sure way to get back to the start: by exactly
retracing every step he had taken. Rubik couldn't hope
to do that. Randomly twisting the Cube would eventually
produce the ordered state, but he suspected that the
laws of probability were against this occurring in his
lifetime. (It has since been calculated that if every
person on earth randomly twisted a Cube once every second,
about once every three centuries one Cube would return
to its original state.)
Rubik had only an intuition that there must be a method.
He started out by aligning the eight corner cubies correctly,
and he discovered certain sequences of moves for rearranging
just a few cubies at a time. One sequence of four twists,
for instance, would temporarily scramble the cube, exchange
the positions of three cubies, and then restore the
rest of the Cube to its previous state. Other sequences
took twelve twists--with chaotic results if he lost
track of what he was doing halfway through. But Rubik
persevered in his room for more than a month and emerged
in the summer to show his mother a pristine Cube.
''I remember how proudly I demonstrated [it] to her
when I found the solution of the problem, and how happy
she was in the hope that from then on I would not work
so hard on it.''
The puzzle was so intriguing, Rubik thought, that somebody
somewhere must have already invented it--but then wouldn't
he have heard of it? Intriguing puzzles tend to endure.
Today you can still find little plastic versions of
the 15 Puzzle, which was created in the late 1870s and
became history's greatest puzzle craze (until the Cube).
It consists of 15 consecutively numbered, flat squares
that can be slid around inside a square frame. Its creator,
Sam Loyd, an American, offered a $1,000 prize to anyone
who could switch the positions of the 14 and 15 without
affecting the order of the other squares. This was impossible
to do, as Loyd knew, but soon thousands of people around
the world swore they'd done it--and then stayed up all
night trying to reconstruct how. In some ways it was
a two-dimensional version of the Cube, and Rubik, who
played with the 15 Puzzle as a boy, acknowledges that
it may have helped inspire the Cube.
By an odd coincidence, at least two other people were
independently inspired at about the same time. A year
after Ru bik had applied for his Hungarian patent, Terutoshi
Ishige, an ironworks owner, applied for a Japanese patent
for a cube held together by the same sort of mechanism
(although shaped slightly differently). An American,
Larry Nichols, actually patented his cube before Ru
bik, but it was rejected by all the toy companies he
went to (including Ideal Toy Corporation, which later
bought the rights to Rubik's Cube). Some purists belittle
Nichols's model, which was held together with magnets,
and insist that the real genius in Rubik's is in the
mechanism holding it together. In 1984 a federal judge
ruled that the distribution of the Cube in America did
infringe Nichols's patent, but made no decision on his
claim for $60 million in damages. The case is being
appealed.
Rubik, unaware of any other cube, applied for his patent
in January 1975 and left his invention with a small
toymaking cooperative in Budapest. The patent was finally
approved in early 1977. Nine months passed before the
cooperative agreed to begin production, and the first
Cubes appeared at the end of 1977. By this time Rubik
was married to a former classmate from the Academy (''a
quiet and stubborn girl,'' he called her; he turned
down my request to see her) and living on the upper
two floors of his father's house. Not long after the
Cubes reached the shops, Rubik took his new baby daughter
to a playground in Budapest and saw two of them in action.
''The first belonged (I am sure only temporarily) to
an eight-year-old street urchin, barefooted, shirt torn,
covered in bruises, broken and chewed nails, badly in
need of a good wash--a small Oliver Twisting,'' he wrote.
''The second emerged from the elegant handbag of a still
youthful mother in her thirties who must have just emerged
from the beauty salon. She was sitting on a bench and
cast only an occasional glance at her baby in the pram,
so thoroughly was she immersed in the Cube. It was astounding
to catch on the faces of these diametrically opposite
people-- the very same expression.''
It would be uplifting to report that the world soon
joined the urchin and the young matron in beating a
path to Rubik's door, but that was not to be. The cube
seemed destined for a sedate life within Hungary until
Tibor Laczi arrived. Then the Cube became a capitalist's
dream that finally ruined its socialist manufacturer.
''Do you think, Laczi, that you could sell 30,000 pieces?''
''Rubik, if it were only 30,000, I wouldn't touch it.''
--A meeting of minds in 1978
The way Laczi tells it, he knew the Cube's potential
the moment he twisted it in a Hungarian cafe in November
1978. Laczi, a Hungarian emigre living in Vienna, had
stopped at the small-town cafe while driving to Budapest
on a routine sales trip for an Austrian computer company.
His waiter had a Cube but wasn't sure how it worked.
Laczi, a mathematics buff, bought it from him for about
$1.
The next day Laczi visited the state trading company,
Konsumex, and asked for permission to sell the Cube
in the West. ''They laughed at me,'' Laczi recalls.
''They said the Cube was finished. They had ordered
10,000 from the manufacturer and then canceled half
the order. They had already displayed it at international
toy fairs and nobody was interested. I asked them tactfully
how they displayed it. They said it was on a shelf with
hundreds of other toys. Was it taken out of its box?
They didn't know. How many people working at the booth
could demonstrate how to solve the puzzle? None of them--it
was not their responsibility.''
Laczi got permission to visit Rubik. ''When Rubik first
walked into the room I felt like giving him some money,''
he says. ''He looked like a beggar. He was terribly
dressed, and he had a cheap Hungarian cigarette hanging
out of his mouth. But I knew I had a genius on my hands.
I told him we could sell millions.''
Rubik taught him how to demonstrate the Cube, which
Laczi proceeded to do at the Nuremberg toy fair several
months later. He didn't have a booth--he just strolled
around gathering crowds like a carnival barker, and
he intrigued a well connected British toy expert named
Tom Kremer.
Says Laczi, ''Kremer took one of my Cubes and said to
me, 'Both of us are now holding in our hands a wonder
of the world.' '' Later that year Kremer helped arrange
the breakthrough: an order for a million Cubes from
Ideal Toy.
The puzzle, called the Magic Cube (Buvuos Kocka) in
Hungary, was renamed Rubik's Cube, not to honor Rubik--although
it was this change that made him famous--but to compensate
for a troublesome oversight. Neither Rubi nor the Hungarian
manufacturer had bothered to patent the Cube in foreign
countries, and now it was too late to apply. (Many countries
require that foreign patent applications be made within
a year of the original application.) Unable to protect
the Cube's design, Ideal Toy wanted at least a name
that could be copyrighted. This meant going West to
promote his Cube, and Rubik started in Vienna with Laczi.
''It was his first trip to the West, and he didn't ask
me to take him anywhere after the press conference,''
Laczi says. ''Most Hungarians that come here want to
look at shops or buy jewelry or visit a bar or a striptease.
Rubik went back to his hotel. He was always that way,
even after the money started. He never liked to be away
from his family for long or spend money on himself.
The only thing he did was start smoking better cigarettes.
There was no drinking, no women--he just went back to
his hotel room to read. He was always in another world.
I really do like Rubik, but I can't imagine having a
real friendship with him. He doesn't enjoy talking.''
This last trait wasn't especially suited to promotion
tours. Glad-handing toy executives and giving interviews
made Rubik miserable. He would try to explain why the
Cube appealed to an innate human fascination with order
and chaos, and all the reporter wanted to know was how
long it took him to solve it (two or three minutes)
and whether it was really true that the man reputed
to be the Iron Curtain's first legitimate self-made
millionaire still couldn't get a telephone (it was).
Or they would ask, ''What does it feel like to be famous?''
and Rubik would want to answer ''What does it feel like
not to be famous?''
In 1980 the craze took off, and soon devotees--Cubic
Rubes, someone called them-- formed clubs to study solutions
and build ''racing cubes'' by lu bricating the innards.
At the world championship in Budapest in June 1982,
a 16-year-old Vietnamese high school student from Los
Angeles won by unscrambling a Cube in 22.95 seconds.
Rubik's original method, aligning the corners first,
was one standard approach; another technique was to
align the top layer, then clear up the other sides one
at a time. These solutions required 80 to 120 twists.
Mathematicians vied to find the shortest method of unscrambling,which
became known as God's algorithm. There's speculation
that an all-knowing being could restore any Cube in
22 moves, but the shortest method discovered so far
requires 52. It was found by a British mathematician
named Morwen B. Thistle- waite. With this method the
Cube doesn't appear to become steadily more ordered--
it seems to remain scrambled until the last few moves,
when the colors mysteriously all slide into place. Thistlewaite
developed it with the aid of a computer and the rules
of group theory.
Group theory is an area of abstract mathematics, developed
in the nineteenth century, that the Cube transformed
into a tangible reality. A group is a collection of
related elements on which certain mathematical operations
are performed. Consider a symmetrical, six-pointed snowflake.
Any rotation that leaves the snowflake in an apparently
unchanged position (multiples of 60 degrees) forms a
member of the group. The 43 quintillion arrangements
of the Cube can also be thought of as a group: twist
any arrangement of the Cube and you get another element
of the group.
For physicists, the Cube has special significance. Solomon
Golomb of the University of Southern California uses
it as a model to illustrate the properties of the elementary
particles: a clockwise rotation of a corner cubie represents
a quark; a counterclockwise rotation, an antiquark.
The configuration of the corner cubies leads either
to a baryon, consisting of three quarks, or a meson,
a quark-antiquark pair.
By 1982 the craze was over and the toy's Hungarian manufacturer
was going bust--quite a feat when you consider that
probably more than 100 million Cubes were sold worldwide.
But that was precisely the problem: a centrally planned
economy isn't accustomed to dealing with consumer crazes.
A Budapest writer, Mezei Andras, has written a book
and a play called The Hungarian Cube chronicling the
debacle. It started when the officials at the small
manufacturing cooperative, Politech nika, insisted on
trying to expand their operations to meet the burgeoning
demand instead of farming out work to other factories.
''The company took a loan from the government,'' Andras
told me,''but they had to wait nine or ten months for
it to be approved by all the proper com- mittees. Then
it took them six months to order and receive the manufacturing
equipment they needed. By that time the craze was finished,
so the company had a large debt and no popular product,
and the state had to save it from going bankrupt.''
In the meantime, factories in the Far East had been
churning outpirated versions-- which accounted for half
of the estimated 100 million sold-- and Ideal Toy had
been forced to turn to other manufacturers for its Cubes.
At one point the Hungarians were so desperate that they
bought a million Cubes from Hong Kong and tried to pass
them off as made in Hungary. This proved especially
embarrassing when the shipment was returned because
800,000 Cubes were defective.
''Everyone made money on the Cube except the Hungarians,''
Andras said, ''but it was still a good lesson for us.
It has taught people that our way of centrally directing
the economy has to change. We can be socialists and
still have a market-oriented economy.''
Today Hungary has a growing number of private businesses
and the freest economy in the Eastern bloc (''goulash
communism,'' the commentators call it)--not directly
because of the Cube, of course, but Rubik has certainly
become the country's equivalent of a Horatio Alger hero.
I heard plenty of sniping in Budapest against the local
nouveau riche (such as black marketeers or operators
of the newly fashionable hamburger stands), but I didn't
hear anyone begrudge Rubik his fortune. People seemed
proud of him and said he deserved his share of the Cube's
proceeds, which was reported to be about five per cent.
I was told by knowledgeable sources that he has made
$3 million or $4 million, more than anyone else in Hungary
has earned (legally, that is), and enough to send lots
of Hungarian inventors in the direction of Tibor Laczi.
''I get several letters from them a day,'' says Laczi,
who livesin a lavish house in Vienna, wears a diamond
ring, and markets inventions full time. ''I think the
Eastern bloc has many more inventors than the West.
In the West people have to work, but in the East they
get their salary no matter what, so they can sit in
their offices and think all day. Everybody has connections,
so they can always get a sample made for free somewhere.
They all want to be like Rubik, and today it is easier
for them. There are more export firms now, and the officials
are better. If anyone puts up an obstacle, the inventor
can make a loud complaint, 'Let's remember Rubik's Cube.'
''
Of course, certain philosophical East-West differences
remain. Laczi tells of going to the premiere of The
Hungarian Cube. ''At the end of the play they introduced
me and brought me on stage next to the actor who plays
me. Afterwards a crowd of people came to me nd asked
for my autograph and thanked me for all that I done
for the Hungarian state. I said to them, 'But I didn't
do it for the state. I did it for myself.' ''
''What does a socialist millionaire do with his money?''
When this question was put to Rubik several years ago
by Life and Literature, an intellectual weekly in Budapest,
he devoted a good deal of time-- most of the interview,
in fact-- to not answering it. It wasn't just the ideological
issue that bothered him (although he did insist that
successes like his wouldn't ''corrupt socialist ethics''
or lead to ''lavish spending''). He sounded genuinely
troubled by the money and what came with it: ''For me
it is another quiz, a new puzzle, and it is not so easy
to find the proper solution,'' he said, and lamented,
''Success has taken away from me the time necessary
for looking inside, together with silence and peace.''
In our meetings last fall he seemed as worried as ever.
''Mistrustful'' was the word his acquaintances kept
using. ''He's afraid that people will take advantage
of him,'' said Laczi. ''You know, in this play about
the Cube, the rest of us all gave permission to use
our real names. But Rubik wanted his changed. He suggested
they name the inventor Bubik. He was finally convinced
it would sound silly, and his name was used. But it
tells you something.''
Rubik, who obviously does not need to work--$3 million
goes a long way in Budapest-- told me he would return
to his teaching job when his present one-year sabbatical
ends. ''I want to try to keep my life the same,'' Rubik
said, although he seems reconciled to a few changes.
He now has a telephone in his apartment (but doesn't
know when he'll get one for his house). After years
of urging from Laczi, he has moved up from his dilapidated
Polski Fiat to the Mercedes and a Volkswagen Golf (the
same cars that Laczi has). His clothing is slightly
upgraded but no more formal--turtleneck, corduroys,
high-top white sneakers.
He has donated $200,000 to endow a foundation to help
promising inventors in Hungary. He has also provided
most of the money to establish a private cooperative,
the Rubik Studio, which employs a dozen people and is
planning to design such items as furniture and toys.
Since the Cube, Ru bik has produced several other toys--the
most successful was Rubik's Snake, which could be twisted
into shapes--and he told me that some day he wants to
try his hand at designing computer games. He also spoke
vaguely of attempting to develop a ''general theory
of structures.''
He's readying a new toy for release sometime this year.
It's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, I heard elsewhere,
but Rubik doesn't want to talk about the toy or its
prospects.
''People always ask me if I will surpass the Cube,''
he says. ''What can I answer? I did not plan to make
the Cube. I did not plan the success. I wanted nothing
else than to make the object as perfect as possible.
Now, after the Cube, I still don't have any plans to
make anything like it. I'm still the same person, thinking
the same way, so it's possible I will invent something.
But to want to repeat the Cube--that is not the way
to live.''
Rubik sometimes mentions the Golden Age of the Cube,
by which hemeans the time before the craze, back when
''it brought only delights to me.'' He has a lot of--well,
interesting--explanations for those delights. He discusses
the way the Cube can seem alive as it heats up in your
hand, and the fact that each face of the Cube is made
of three layers of three blocks. ''For me, the number
three seems to have a particular significance, relevant
in some strange ways to the relation between man and
nature. Take mother-child-father, heav- en-earth-hell,
creation-preservation-destruction, birth-life-death.''
Sometimes he talks about the Cube as an imitation of
life itself--or even as an improvement on life.
''The problems of puzzles are very near the problems
of life,'' he said at his studio one morning. ''Our
whole life is solving puzzles. If you are hungry, you
have to find something to eat. But everyday problems
are very mixed-- they're not clear. A good puzzle, it's
a fair thing. Nobody is lying. It's very clear, and
the problem depends just on you. You can solve it independently.
But to find happiness in life, you're not independent.
That's the big difference.''
I took out some toothpicks to show Rubik another kind
of puzzle. It was from a book by Martin Gardner called
aha! Insight. Gardner, a great American puzzle expert
(and DISCOVER contributor), had collected problems requiring
a sudden inspiration--a refreshing alternative to the
Cube, I thought. (Gardner, incidentally, never had the
patience for the Cube either.) ''Tell me what you think
of this,'' I said. ''How do you move two toothpicks
and leave exactly four unit squares?''
''Move just two,'' Rubik repeated to himself, sitting
up in his chair. He tried removing two from the table,
which wasn't allowed--they had to stay in the diagram.
Then he produced this formation, which was clever, but
the four squares had to be the same size. He wanted
to know if he could double up some of the toothpicks--also
illegal, but I did admire the effort. This was the first
sign of life I'd seen in three days. He nibbled at his
fingernails and played with the tooth- picks for five
intense minutes.
''There is a trick,'' he said, exasperated.
But after another couple of minutes he relaxed. He showed
me theanswer:
''It's a nice puzzle,'' he said.
''This is called the aha! instinct. It's one quick--''
''A flash,'' he said.
''Yes,'' I replied. ''It's very different from the Cube
that way.''
''Yes, but with the Cube there are many flashes, there
are many aha's.''
I told him that the problem
I had with the Cube was that it took so much grunt work
to remember all of the required ma- neuvers.
But Rubik wasn't listening. He was already rearranging
the toothpicks to show one of his favorite puzzles.
Then he grabbed Gardner's book and turned to its next
puzzle, which is to rearrange the toothpicks below to
form six unit squares:
''Make six unit squares,'' he muttered. ''Make six .
. . they must all be the same size?''
''Yes,'' I said, devoutly hoping to see him squirm here--a
smallrevenge I could extract on behalf of the millions
of Cube dropouts. I'd always had a theory that we were
the intelligent ones. As Rubik stared at the toothpicks
and muttered, it pleased me to reflect that I had solved
this problem in only about ten minutes. What pleased
me even more was my conviction that this particular
aha!, this nimble leap of intellect, was beyond the
reach of any mind that would slog through the Cube.
But he got it in less than a minute. Rubik suddenly
realized that he could use the toothpicks to form squares
in a three-dimensional structure.
''Ah, it's the Cube,'' he said, smiling and nodding
to himself as he contemplated the tooth- picks in his
hands. He looked very much alone, and very happy. |
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