on being puzzled...
“It can be refreshing to mentally inhabit, even for a few minutes, a world in which a goal and the means of reaching it are perfectly clear, and where our reward is complete comprehension of the whole.”
Peter Turchi from A Muse and Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic
I have a confession to make—like millions of others in the mid-1980’s I had a Rubik’s cube.
I was never as sucked into solving it as some other people, and there weren’t Google or YouTube tutorials back then to help me find the solution. I managed to solve a single side, returning it to a solid colour. After that, I got frustrated—until one of the pieces popped out. When putting it back, I realized (as did others) that the Cube can be taken apart, then reassembled back to its solved state. As the Cube is a puzzle that arrived without instructions, was that cheating?
Recently, I stumbled across Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All by Erno Rubik—the Hungarian inventor of the Cube. As he states it, he discovered the Cube back in 1974 (by the 80s when Cube craze hit my part of the world we had no idea we were playing with a puzzle from the other side of the Iron Curtain!).
Rubik’s book is a delight. He presents his thought process of how he came up with the Cube as if it was an obvious thing to invent, while lamenting how writing about it was the hard part.
Rubik’s cube is a kind of puzzle (and a hard one)—the kind one needs to sit down and focus on, be willing to try things out and spend time on. Solving it requires creativity and experimentation.
According to Rubik:
“I was the first person in history to face a scrambled cube, and as anyone else who has ever faced one will attest, unscrambling it was not going to be simple or quick.”
“But the more I twisted and turned, the more uncertain I became. It gradually dawned on me that I had been spending much more time trying to get back to where I had started than I’d taken to get lost in the first place.”
As I solved the Cube by disassembly, another puzzle came to mind when I read Rubik’s words—the puzzle of navigating a new place, especially if that place requires three dimensional thinking. Like a city with a subway, making finding my way around requiring two separate planes—the street level and the subway level. Even though the two intersect, how they intersect can sometimes provide an extra challenge.
Years ago, I took the subway back to my hotel in Hong Kong (the single night I was there). I got off at the right stop, loaded with the knowledge that I had to be close to the hotel. When I got out on the street, nothing looked familiar.
It turned out the exit was different than the entrance I’d used a few hours earlier. I ended up on a different street right in the middle of a night market. Even though I’d only been there a few hours earlier, it felt like a different world.
My hotel was only a few blocks away, but it took a lot of walking to find it—much more walking than I’d needed to do to get to the subway in the first place. (I never felt worried that I was lost or unsafe and walking the night market was fascinating).
Back to Rubik’s Cube…
His technique was to get all the corners in place first, while I always solved a side for a solid colour (and then found myself stuck). With persistence, it took him a month to solve it the first time.
The current world record (2018) for speedcubing is 3.47 seconds, which leaves me amazed anyone can solve it that fast—and that speedcubing is a thing. The average number of moves for a speedcuber is around 50, yet mathematical modelling has shown a cube can be solved in much less. Theoretically, from any starting position, a Cube can be solved in roughly 20 moves (which blows my mind).
Another random tidbit—most people start solving the Cube with the white side (I always started with green).
As Rubik describes it: “The Cube has been a toy for children, an intensely competitive sport, and a vehicle for high-tech explorations and discoveries in artificial intelligence and bewildering mathematics.” The fact that what appears to be a simple toy on the surface, can actually be so much, is fascinating—and makes me want to play around with one again.