Rubik's Cube: Specializing in Problems That Only Seem Impossible to Solve

[gristy]

“It’s a little plastic toy,” said Jessica Fridrich, tossing a Rubik’s Cube between her long-fingered hands on a stormy afternoon in her office at Binghamton University, her fingernails painted with a pastel pink gloss.

But the little toy, an icon of the era of Pac-Man and high-top sneakers, has made a big comeback. For a thriving subculture of people who try to solve the cube as fast as possible, Dr. Fridrich is a pioneer and a patron saint. She forged what remains arguably the world’s most common strategy for speed-solving the puzzle, and appeared in a documentary about the Rubik’s Cube released this fall.

Dr. Fridrich first cracked the colorful walls of the Rubik’s Cube in 1981 as a teenager living in a Czech coal mining city. Few people will spend decades decoding a plastic block, no matter how mathematically intricate. But few people are as tenacious as the architect of “The Fridrich Method,” a roadmap that requires a speedcuber to memorize and unleash at least 53 algorithms, each of which is a series of turns of the cube’s rows and columns in a given sequence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/science/16prof.html?_r=1&ref=science

[Orrex]

1. Dupe thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=228&topic_id=47472&mesg_id=47472

[gristy]

2. oops

I hate it when that happens!

[Orrex]

3. Me too

More than once I've posted what I thought was a great new story, only to find out that I was like the fourth or fifth person to debut it here...


Don't sweat it!
:hi: