Excerpt
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): It couldn’t be simpler or, for most of us, more difficult.
Twenty-six cubes designed to interlock and rotate around an axis that can be shuffled 43-quintillion ways. (That’s 43 with 18-zeros after it.)
And yet, all Rubik’s Cubes can be solved in 20 or fewer moves. It’s puzzled, pained, delighted and challenged millions — from young children to this robot.
PAUL HOFFMAN: I mean, it’s industrial strength. It normally paints cars on an assembly line, but it’s been programmed to do a Rubik’s Cube.
JEFFREY BROWN: The robot is part of a new exhibit called ‘Beyond Rubik’s Cube,’ that opened in April, at the Liberty Science Center – across the river from Manhattan in New Jersey – to celebrate the 40th birthday of the cube.
ERNO RUBIK: 40 years is it’s a very long time.
JEFFREY BROWN: And in a rare public appearance, inventor Erno Rubik was on hand to meet fans and talk about the impact of his work.
Rubik was a 29-year-old architecture professor in Budapest when he created the cube in 1974. What began as a teaching tool to demonstrate spatial relations for his students grew into something that, by his own account is, well, less practical.
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