Retro-Roalty is a post about the colorful, classic toy that was fun to solve. A little bit of nostalgia never hurt anyone.
Here is my story:
I was a master at the Rubik’s Cube. I can remember the first time I solved one. It took me two weeks of serious dedication. I would sit down with it and try to work on it while watching TV or even while falling asleep in bed at night. When I finally solved it, I was so proud of myself! I was only in 5th grade, but I felt like a genius!
I would go around solving people’s cubes when they couldn’t figure out how to do it. It took me a long time to learn how to solve them quickly, but once I did, there was no stopping me! The only problem is that the act of solving them became boring really fast. Now things are different because now you have apps where you can play games with the cube on your phone or tablet.
The Rubik’s Cube inspired many more interesting puzzles and games like Sudoku and Tetris. Some people think that the Rubik’s Cube is just an old game that doesn’t have anything new for us anymore,
Fun fact: it was in this very blog that I first mentioned my art series, “Retro-Roalty” (before the name existed) and wrote my first post about the colorful, classic toy that was fun to solve. That little bit of nostalgia never hurt anyone.
So, how did I start? Well…
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had two obsessions: solving puzzles and drawing. My mother tells me how she used to come home from work and find me still up in the middle of the night trying out different possible solutions to my Rubik’s Cube (which used to be my favorite toy).
Unfortunately, the joy of solving a puzzle isn’t everlasting; soon enough you get your desired result and lose interest. Besides, you can only keep on playing with a Rubik’s Cube for so long which is why I ended up letting go of it after a couple of years. But that didn’t mean I stopped drawing or solving puzzles altogether!
A couple of years ago, while browsing through YouTube videos one day, I stumbled upon something interesting: 3D printed puzzles. They were made with an FDM 3D printer which allowed them to print on large scales (1:1) without losing details or accuracy. After watching
In the heyday of the Rubik’s Cube, I was a master.
I played with it so much that I could solve it in about 30 seconds. I didn’t do this out of any sort of desire to be the best, but because I liked to make the colors match up. The best way to do that is not just to line them up and hope they stay there, but to touch each one exactly once and in the right order. It’s a long sequence of moves, but anyone who has tried to solve a Rubik’s Cube knows that once you know what you are doing, it goes pretty fast.
I used to practice when I was bored in class by taking one apart, solving it, and then putting it back together again. It would never occur to me that this might be weird behavior for someone my age.
My friends and I would hold competitions: Who could solve their cube fastest? Time limits were our friend here; otherwise we might have kept going until we got everything perfect. The record was 10 seconds (very impressive), followed by 17 seconds (also impressive).
I spent many happy hours solving the Rubik’s Cube in the 1980s. I even taught a class on how to solve it. And as I looked at the Wikipedia article on the cube, I got a little nostalgic for those days.
The Rubik’s Cube was a unique toy. Invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik, it was a puzzle that seemed to be in three-dimensional form what the ancient Greeks had done with two-dimensional forms: create something that was self-contained and complete, that was beautiful, harmonious and balanced.
The exact mechanism by which the cube works is still mysterious (and is still being debated), but it has been demonstrated to us many times — most often by kids twisting up their own in less than ten seconds — that it is clearly possible to take these colored squares and arrange them in such a way that they stay that way through an infinite number of twists and turns.
It’s one of those things you can do only once, because like riding a bicycle or writing your own name, once you know how to do it, you can never unlearn how to do it again. There are patterns on the sides of the cube that tell
Rubik’s Cube is a toy that many of us played with as kids. A Rubik’s cube is a 3-D puzzle game invented in 1974 by Ernő Rubik. It consists of 27 smaller cubes, and the object of the game is to arrange them in a certain way so that each side of the cube has only one color.
Till present day, hundreds of thousands of people around the world still solve it, some more than once. Several methods exist to solve the cube (an easy method takes about 20 minutes), and there are competitions where people compete to see who can solve it the fastest.
The most famous one-handed method was developed by Jessica Fridrich in 1996. For people who don’t know this method, it might look impossible: you rotate not only pieces but also the entire cube while solving it. The resulting movement looks like magic. I’m not sure how fast you can solve it, but I am sure it’s faster than me.
I remember playing with my brother when I was little. I would be mesmerized by the colors, but lost because I couldn’t solve it on my own. My brother would always help me out, and then we’d never play with it again for a while until we had another chance to play with each other.
It just so happened that my family moved around a lot when I was a kid, and we finally ended up in a new house when I was about 10 years old. It was one of those houses on the outskirts of town that is set back from the street and had a big grassy area for kids to play. It was out in the middle of nowhere!
In this new house, I found a Rubik’s Cube under one of the beds in the guest bedroom closet. It was probably left behind by some relative that stayed there once or twice. It wasn’t mine, but it didn’t really matter. It belonged to the whole family, so anyone could use it whenever they wanted to.
I started practicing again…and practicing…and practicing some more! Soon enough I could solve it consistently within under a minute! But there were still times where it would take longer for me to solve it due to being distracted or thinking too long about which
Today, I am going to share with you a memory of mine, not one that is special or important, but one that is special to me because it was the first time I really tried to master something. Before that, there was always just playing around, never anything serious.
When I was in middle school (late 80s), my parents got me a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas. It was not the regular 3x3x3 cube but a bigger one. I can’t remember what size it was, maybe 4x4x4 or 5x5x5, but I think it was 4x4x4.
I was so happy with it! I had tried solving the smaller cubes before and they all frustrated me because they were kind of easy, since they only had 12 pieces on each side and all of them were visible. This big cube looked much more difficult to me.
But then when I tried to solve it (back then I did everything without watching tutorials or reading any books) I realized that there were still corners missing and this made the whole thing very confusing for me. So instead of trying to finish the whole puzzle like a lot of people do (which is way too hard), I started working on two sides at once.