fix grammar: In 1974 in Budapest, an architect named Erno Rubik had just created a puzzle to help his students learn three-dimensional movement. His creation, “Bűvös kocka," or Magic Cube, would grow beyond the Iron Curtain to become the world’s best-selling puzzle and become famous by his last name, Rubik’s Cube.
The Rubik’s Cube features a unique mechanism that allows its six faces, each covered by nine stickers of one of six solid colors, to twist and turn independently without falling apart. The challenge is to align the colors so that each of the six faces becomes a uniform color. What seems easy on the surface is incredible complex, with 43 quintillion combinations, enough to be completely impossible to solve by chance in a lifetime.
At the time, puzzles were just a niche market, and they were only found in specialities shops, but it was about to change for the Rubik’s Cube. After being spotted in the 1979 Nuremburg Toy Fair by a marketer named Tom Kremer, it was brought to Ideal Toy Company in the United States. By the early 1980s, the cube was featured in American TV commercials and advertising and became the star of an animated series in 1983 called “Rubik, the Amazing Cube”, and its popularity skyrocketed.
Since then, millions have taken on the challenge of solving it. Although it took Erno more than four months to solve the first Rubik’s Cube, the best players today can solve one in just a few seconds. It is an example of how our collective intelligence and building knowledge on top of each other can significantly improve how we solve challenges.
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