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Neapolitan · 12-13-2013, 02:30 AM

Apologies for hijacking this thread and turning it into naught but a nerdy mathematical thread, but these videos about the Rubik's cube are pretty cool videos. Not sure how accurate they are but, if they are truthful, then it's quite vexing and puzzling. The puzzling part of the Rubik's cube might not be a true paradox, but the fact that the combinations are in the Quintillions (43,252,003,274,489,856,000) and yet it can be solved in less than 10 seconds for experts speed-cubers, sub-30 seconds for advance speed-cubers, about 2 to 3 minutes on average for the average cuber and maybe a few months for the novice is sorta paradoxical considering if one went every single permutation it would take "1400 trillion years to finish to go through all the configurations." Any thoughts or feedback would be much appreciated.

Quote:

With 6 colored sides, 21 pieces and 54 outer surfaces, there's a combined total of over 43 quintilliondifferent possible configurations. To put that into perspective: if you turned the Rubik's cube once every second it would take you 1400 trillion years to finish to go through all the configurations. If you had started this project during the Big Bang, you still wouldn't be done yet.

Another way to think about this is, if a person had as many Rubik's cubes as there were possible configurations, they could cover the surface of the Earth 275 times. And if one considers the number of configurations you could reach by disassembling and reassembling the cube, the number would be nearly 12 times that many

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