Rubik's Cube

I hadn't realised that was 40 years ago. I had one of the first cubes in the US, smuggled out before it was quite legal - though I doubt many cared, and a few had already gone to some mathematicians worldwide.  A Hungarian emigre who worked at IBM in Manassas with a friend of mine in 1980 had visited family back home and seen the cubes in stores, and thought he knew people who would like it.  My friend and his wife were already scheduled to come visit us and nabbed one of the very few the guy had brought out in his suitcase.

I loved it, both the puzzle of the pattern and the mechanism of it.  I quickly figured out how to get the top level right, slowly worked out the second level, but never got the third level on my own. Early on I had shown it to a pal who was a math major at Williams, who immediately offered some possible ways to solve it, and I knew he was doing things in his brain I had no understanding of.  It is an example I keep returning to when I talk about some cognitive functions being hardwired. Yes, he had been exposed to a lot of mathematics, but so had I, and neither of us had seen anything like it previously. He clicked it into his brain and started rotating it there, even as he toyed with it and saw what it did. Beyond me.

Now that I can watch the real experts, the kids who can devote a lot of time to repeated trials hoping for it to all come together for a perfect run, I am even more convinced.


Yes, they were much slower when they first learned. Yes, obsessive practice has taught them to see the cube and its pattern in a different way. I don't care. They are doing something I not only cannot do, I cannot even imagine how they are doing it.