Cousin Bina writes about a digital forensics specialist who went from modeling rock deformation to creating 53 algorithms for solving the Rubik’s cube, all of which the user has to memorize before tackling any given cube.
NYTimes | Specializing in Problems That Only Seem Impossible to Solve
The following anecdote impresses me the most. Despite being a mathematics-loving teenager, I tried to get away from anything more than required homework. As quickly as humanly possible.
As a teenager, Dr. Fridrich saw a man demonstrating the Rubik“s Cube at a mathematics seminar, and scrambled defiantly through a crowd to touch it. She says it was immediately clear that she was cube possessed, her shorthand for people who spend most of their waking hours learning to speed-solve the cube. Even though no cubes were for sale in her country then ” the few people who had them bought them in Hungary ” she would not be stopped. She picked up Kvant, a Russian math journal that outlined one method of solving the cube, and worked it out on paper.
Nerd. I’m jealous. Bina said the subject reminded her of me. I’m flattered, but this woman is in a league of her own.
You know, there’s a cheap trick for making it appear on video that you can speed-solve a Rubik’s Cube. Get a brand-new cube and record yourself in reverse scrambling it. Then play it back in forward mode.