An international celebration of 50 years of the Rubik’s Cube took place at Christ’s this week with an event attended by the cube’s creator Ernő Rubik, chess grandmasters Judit Polgár and Luke McShane, maths communicators, and academics from fields including psychology and classics.
Hungarian architecture professor Ernő Rubik, created a prototype of a three-dimensional cube in 1974 and used it to teach his students about three-dimensional spaces.
Originally called the ‘Magic Cube,’ the cube has more than 43 quintillion possibilities. The three-dimensional 3x3 grid is solved by turning it so that each surface displays the same colour.
Rubik told Fortune in an interview earlier this year:
“I got an interest from [a] young age about problem-solving, challenges, chess problems and so on.”
The cube took him a month to solve, but said Rubik, “So, I thought well, if I can do it, somebody else can.”
In 2023 speed-cuber Max Park, who gave a special demonstration at this week’s event, set a world record - solving the cube in just 3.314 seconds.
Rubik's@50 - the celebration at Christ’s - was an opportunity for talks and discussions on issues such as autism and puzzle-solving and the role of AI, as well as for networking, demonstrations … and fun.
Christ’s student and President of the Darwin Society Dhruv Shenai said:
“This was a brilliant day for Christ’s College. It was an event brimming with ideas. One of my personal highlights was the chess game held in Hall.”
Event organiser, Paul Fannon OBE, Assistant Professor of Mathematical and Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge said:
“It was wonderful to see so many generations of Christ's drawn together by their fascination for both the Rubik's Cube and Chess.
I was amazed at how many Christ's Alumni currently working in wonderful roles creating algorithms for DeepMind or winning awards for Mathematical Outreach could link their work to these puzzles and wanted to come back to share their expertise.
For me the best part was seeing all the wonderful conversations which were happening between the talks, and I hope to see these conversations continue.”
Banner Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne on Unsplash