Bright and early on the first Saturday in January, Tomas Rokicki and a few hundred fellow enthusiasts gathered in a vast lecture hall at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. A big math conference was underway and Rokicki, a retired programmer based in Palo Alto, California, had helped organize a two-day special session about “serious recreational mathematics” celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Rubik’s Cube. Erno Rubik, the Cube’s inventor, was top of the show at 8 a.
m., via videoconference from the south of Spain. Rubik, a Hungarian architect, designer, sculptor and retired professor, took part in a Q&A session with Rokicki and his co-organizers, Erik Demaine, a computer scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Robert Hearn, a retired computer scientist, of Portola Valley, California.
Rokicki asked Rubik about the first time he solved the Cube: “Did you solve corners-first?” These days, new cubers learn on YouTube, watching tutorials at 1.5x speed. Rokicki instead recommends the old-fashioned strategy: Set out on a lone path and discover a solving method, even if it takes weeks or months.
(It took computer scientist Donald Knuth less than 12 hours, starting at his dining table in the evening and working straight through to the morning.) Corners-first is a common route, since once the corners are solved, the edges can be slotted in with relative ease. Rubik said that, yes, he indeed did corners-first.
Rubik, who is known to take a philo.