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17th October 2018 by tprevot BBC News – School Report 0 comments

Rubik’s Renaissance

By Benjamin

Since 2005 the famous Rubik’s Cube trend has come back to life nearly everywhere in the world. From a simple toy lying in your cupboard to a competitive hobby, one out of seven people have already played with it. But why is it so popular?

The Rubik’s Cube was invented in 1974 by the Hungarian architect Ernö Rubik and has rapidly spread its cubes over the world as it is now the most sold toy ever made. Probably because of these factors: there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible scrambles, which makes every solve unique when compared to other repetitive toys. Also, the fact of seeing your times decrease with each solve keeps you passionate about the Magic Cube (its original name).

It all began with a global competition in 1982, open to anyone. The winner of this championship was Ming Thai with a world record time of 22.85 seconds. Although time shave changed: the current best time for the regular 3x3x3 cube is 4.59 seconds, a prowess achieved by the 22-year old Australian Feliks A. Zemdegs. Now, the fascination with the puzzle has become highly competitive, as contests are being organised all around the world by the World Cube Association (W.C.A.).

“The “cubing” community is really like a second family for me.” declared Daniel Goodman. Every true “cuber” (the name of a person devoted to the Cube) collects many puzzles of different size, shape and colour-as you can see from the photographs accompanying this article. They can turn their cube, meticulously prepared with special tensions and rapid lubricants (oils), at over fifteen turns per second.

In conclusion, is the Rubik’s cube only one of these ephemeral childhood trends (such as fidget spinners, yo-yos or slime) or is it more like a positive obsession? Stuck in a time warp and still mostly underground, except for within the cubing community? It is an iconic symbol that everyone can recognise across the world, whether they are passionate about it or not, because everybody has heard about it, although some will never know how to solve it. For some people, it is an element of nostalgia, for others it is a new and exciting challenge. Are you ready to plunge into the craze?

 Back : BBC News School Report

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