How many different possible configurations are there?? Would you believe there are roughly 43 billion billion (ya, I said billion twice….not a typo!)? That’s 43 x 10^18!

Ok….that’s a lot. But so what?

Mathematicians are interested in finding “how many moves are needed to solve a MAXimally jumbled up cube”. In other words, what’s the smallest number of moves that will solve EVERY combination? It seems that this is a very difficult problem to solve considering the amount of possible combinations and the computation time needed to solve it. From the article I read in the August issue of New Scientist, the number looms near 20 (proven to be 22, but suspected to be 20).

So, you mean to tell me that I can solve any and every combination of the Rubik’s cube in no more than 20 moves? How depressing…..I’ve never solved one of those damn things!