8 ms·

The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)

128 points by musha68k 9y ago

ceautery 9y ago
"It also violated the toy industry's standards: it didn't talk, whistle, cry, shoot, change clothes, appear in a movie, or require batteries." And it absolutely will not stop, EVER, until you are dead.
- knodi123 9y ago
  *if properly lubricated
patkai 9y ago
I remember those quite dark times in Hungary, I was a small boy in school and one couldn't travel without complicated paperwork and the option of refusals to the West - and we got permission to buy foreign money only once per three years, so that was quite limiting. In those times Rubik was a huge inspiration, even for me. Parents were telling their children in that era of hopelessness and contra selection that "if you are smart like Rubik, you can also achieve things when you grow up". I vaguely remember an interview with him in the late 80's, I think he said that he made the cube because he was outraged by the lack of 3D vision of his students. The "Oliver Twisting" remark is quite funny, actually.
skate22 9y ago
In 2009 our 9th grade geometry teacher had us all learn to solve Rubiks' cube for a semester project. Never knew the story of the inventor thlugh, pretty cool.
indescions_2018 9y ago
This would make a really good movie ;) Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown. The Atomic bomb Considered as Hungarian High School Science Fair Project http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-conside... Denis Gabor's Nobel Lecture On Holography, 1971 https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1971/gabor-lecture.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/19...
- Shengbo 9y ago
  >Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown Could you elaborate on this or provide a link? I've never heard about it before.
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    The language is probably in the top 3 for hardest to learn. Not sure of the 3D stuff.
    - thanatropism 9y ago
      Isn't this because it's so different from anything else? You can sort of divine some German if you're an English speaker and some Italian if you also understand Spanish, etc. But hey, Japanese is highly regular and also very hard to learn. (I did play with Duolingo Hungarian for a while, and it seems interestingly regular, although not in ways you might expect)
      - throwaway7645 9y ago
        Only partly...it has lots of suffixes and prefixes for pretty much everything too. They says it's nearly impossible for a foreigner to learn (of course not true).
      - hanasu 9y ago
        Mostly because it's extremely agglutinative.
d3sandoval 9y ago
Ernö was a professor of mine in an international School in Hungary when I was there for study abroad. He was one of the most insightful people I have ever met and lessons learned from my conversations with him - about perspective, emotion and complexity - still reverberate in my head daily.
- gt2 9y ago
  Any anecdotes you can recall?
  - dcow 9y ago
    Less inspiring, but he's old and has a deep deep—almost menacing—voice. He would always step out of class to take phone calls and by about halfway through I was convinced he runs with Hungarian mafia. I too am curious about your experience.
  - d3sandoval 9y ago
    To answer a sibling. Yes, this was at AIT. One of the moments I remember most vividly was the first project review we were doing. The task was to fold hard construction paper into an object. I was starting work on a human face and had completed just the eye. After taking a few seconds to roll it over in his hands, he handed it back to me and said, "what is it?" I said, "It's a human eye." He responded, "It is not shaped like an eye, it is not colored like an eye, it does not look like an eye." I was very disappointed. Looking back on it years later, that conversation taught me a valuable lesson. Metaphors are built up of tiny little pieces that all come together to form a complete picture. If one of those pieces is off or missing, it's like missing letters from a wrd (word). At a certain point the wd (word) just breaks down until it's not even recognizable as a w (word) anymore... The same goes for design. The eye I had made definitely resembled an eye. It had an iris and it was as round as I could make it. But the illusion of the eye was lost on the viewer and at best it looked like eye-shaped paper. That was the point he was making and my future work suffered until I realized that it wasn't the outcome I should be focusing on. Instead, I should reflect on the individual pieces that make up an experience in order for it to match the user's expectations.
- 9y ago
zeveb 9y ago
> By 1982 the craze was over and the toy's Hungarian manufacturer was going bust — quite a feat when you consider that probably more than 100 million Cubes were sold worldwide. But that was precisely the problem: a centrally planned economy isn’t accustomed to dealing with consumer crazes. A Budapest writer, Mezei Andras, has written a book and a play called The Hungarian Cube chronicling the debacle. It started when the officials at the small manufacturing cooperative, Politech nika, insisted on trying to expand their operations to meet the burgeoning demand instead of farming out work to other factories. > “The company took a loan from the government,” Andras told me, “but they had to wait nine or ten months for it to be approved by all the proper committees. Then it took them six months to order and receive the manufacturing equipment they needed. By that time the craze was finished, so the company had a large debt and no popular product, and the state had to save it from going bankrupt.” There's a lesson in that episode, which applies both to government and large corporations — it's a good part of why startups have such an economic advantage: they can pivot at the drop of a hat, relatively speaking.
- dcow 9y ago
  I think it applies to startups too.
danielvf 9y ago
> Mathematicians vied to find the shortest method of unscrambling, which became known as God's algorithm. There's speculation that an all-knowing being could restore any Cube in 22 moves, but the shortest method discovered so far requires 52. It was found by a British mathematician named Morwen B. Thistlewaite. In 2010 it was finally proven that 20 moves is enough to solve any possible Rubik's cube ordering, and that it can be no lower.
- passivepinetree 9y ago
  That's super interesting. Do you have a source?
  - schmich 9y ago
    God's number is 20: http://www.cube20.org/ http://www.cube20.org/ They pruned a bunch and then did brute force evaluation of the remaining "hard" positions. It seems strange that there hasn't been a more elegant approach to proving this. An interesting (if obvious) corollary to this result is that the maximum moves between any two Rubik's configurations is 20. The relevant HN thread at that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587340
    - passivepinetree 9y ago
      You're the best. Thank you!
    - rurban 9y ago
      In combinatorics counting is always the best strategy. People are usually not good in counting, computers are better fit. So no surprise.
  - TrunkleBob 9y ago
    The page from the team that completed the proof: http://www.cube20.org/ http://www.cube20.org/
  - DSMan195276 9y ago
566d8d6 9y ago
"By an odd coincidence, at least two other people were independently inspired at about the same time" I wasn't aware that there had been other cubes ( at least 1 using the same mechanism) invented independently, but this is a very common phenomenon. For example, calculus was independently invented by (at least) Newton and Leibniz. What's behind this phenomenon ? How is that different people, without communicated and in times gone by without any obvious common influences, imagine and invent the same concepts within the same timeframe ?
- RangerScience 9y ago
  From what I know, it's a combination of prerequisites (can you manufacture this? can you conceive of it?) and pressures (what problems are most people facing?). There's also maybe some selection bias; most (all?) of us hadn't heard of the other two cubes, because they failed to catch on for various reasons; if a cube had been invented sooner, would we have ever heard of it?
- animal531 9y ago
  As a kid I enjoyed the Rubik snake which I could contort into interesting patterns. My brother who was a few years older had a few other cubes, such as some with many more angled faces etc. As for cooperative invention, it would seem that humans are not as unique as we think we are. In exactly the same way we have doppelgangers that look like we do, we also have people that overlap with us in behaviour, personality and ideas. Side by side invention is just one facet of that.
  - 566d8d6 9y ago
    I like that idea of "mental doppelgangers"!

128 points by musha68k 9y ago

"It also violated the toy industry's standards: it didn't talk, whistle, cry, shoot, change clothes, appear in a movie, or require batteries." And it absolutely will not stop, EVER, until you are dead.

knodi123 9y ago
*if properly lubricated

patkai 9y ago

I remember those quite dark times in Hungary, I was a small boy in school and one couldn't travel without complicated paperwork and the option of refusals to the West - and we got permission to buy foreign money only once per three years, so that was quite limiting. In those times Rubik was a huge inspiration, even for me. Parents were telling their children in that era of hopelessness and contra selection that "if you are smart like Rubik, you can also achieve things when you grow up". I vaguely remember an interview with him in the late 80's, I think he said that he made the cube because he was outraged by the lack of 3D vision of his students. The "Oliver Twisting" remark is quite funny, actually.

skate22 9y ago

In 2009 our 9th grade geometry teacher had us all learn to solve Rubiks' cube for a semester project. Never knew the story of the inventor thlugh, pretty cool.

indescions_2018 9y ago

This would make a really good movie ;) Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown. The Atomic bomb Considered as Hungarian High School Science Fair Project http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-conside... Denis Gabor's Nobel Lecture On Holography, 1971 https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1971/gabor-lecture.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/19...

Shengbo 9y ago
>Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown Could you elaborate on this or provide a link? I've never heard about it before.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  The language is probably in the top 3 for hardest to learn. Not sure of the 3D stuff.
  - thanatropism 9y ago
    Isn't this because it's so different from anything else? You can sort of divine some German if you're an English speaker and some Italian if you also understand Spanish, etc. But hey, Japanese is highly regular and also very hard to learn. (I did play with Duolingo Hungarian for a while, and it seems interestingly regular, although not in ways you might expect)
    - throwaway7645 9y ago
      Only partly...it has lots of suffixes and prefixes for pretty much everything too. They says it's nearly impossible for a foreigner to learn (of course not true).
    - hanasu 9y ago
      Mostly because it's extremely agglutinative.

d3sandoval 9y ago

Ernö was a professor of mine in an international School in Hungary when I was there for study abroad. He was one of the most insightful people I have ever met and lessons learned from my conversations with him - about perspective, emotion and complexity - still reverberate in my head daily.

gt2 9y ago
Any anecdotes you can recall?
- dcow 9y ago
  Less inspiring, but he's old and has a deep deep—almost menacing—voice. He would always step out of class to take phone calls and by about halfway through I was convinced he runs with Hungarian mafia. I too am curious about your experience.
- d3sandoval 9y ago
  To answer a sibling. Yes, this was at AIT. One of the moments I remember most vividly was the first project review we were doing. The task was to fold hard construction paper into an object. I was starting work on a human face and had completed just the eye. After taking a few seconds to roll it over in his hands, he handed it back to me and said, "what is it?" I said, "It's a human eye." He responded, "It is not shaped like an eye, it is not colored like an eye, it does not look like an eye." I was very disappointed. Looking back on it years later, that conversation taught me a valuable lesson. Metaphors are built up of tiny little pieces that all come together to form a complete picture. If one of those pieces is off or missing, it's like missing letters from a wrd (word). At a certain point the wd (word) just breaks down until it's not even recognizable as a w (word) anymore... The same goes for design. The eye I had made definitely resembled an eye. It had an iris and it was as round as I could make it. But the illusion of the eye was lost on the viewer and at best it looked like eye-shaped paper. That was the point he was making and my future work suffered until I realized that it wasn't the outcome I should be focusing on. Instead, I should reflect on the individual pieces that make up an experience in order for it to match the user's expectations.
9y ago

zeveb 9y ago

> By 1982 the craze was over and the toy's Hungarian manufacturer was going bust — quite a feat when you consider that probably more than 100 million Cubes were sold worldwide. But that was precisely the problem: a centrally planned economy isn’t accustomed to dealing with consumer crazes. A Budapest writer, Mezei Andras, has written a book and a play called The Hungarian Cube chronicling the debacle. It started when the officials at the small manufacturing cooperative, Politech nika, insisted on trying to expand their operations to meet the burgeoning demand instead of farming out work to other factories. > “The company took a loan from the government,” Andras told me, “but they had to wait nine or ten months for it to be approved by all the proper committees. Then it took them six months to order and receive the manufacturing equipment they needed. By that time the craze was finished, so the company had a large debt and no popular product, and the state had to save it from going bankrupt.” There's a lesson in that episode, which applies both to government and large corporations — it's a good part of why startups have such an economic advantage: they can pivot at the drop of a hat, relatively speaking.

dcow 9y ago
I think it applies to startups too.

danielvf 9y ago

> Mathematicians vied to find the shortest method of unscrambling, which became known as God's algorithm. There's speculation that an all-knowing being could restore any Cube in 22 moves, but the shortest method discovered so far requires 52. It was found by a British mathematician named Morwen B. Thistlewaite. In 2010 it was finally proven that 20 moves is enough to solve any possible Rubik's cube ordering, and that it can be no lower.

passivepinetree 9y ago
That's super interesting. Do you have a source?
- schmich 9y ago
  God's number is 20: http://www.cube20.org/ http://www.cube20.org/ They pruned a bunch and then did brute force evaluation of the remaining "hard" positions. It seems strange that there hasn't been a more elegant approach to proving this. An interesting (if obvious) corollary to this result is that the maximum moves between any two Rubik's configurations is 20. The relevant HN thread at that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587340
  - passivepinetree 9y ago
    You're the best. Thank you!
  - rurban 9y ago
    In combinatorics counting is always the best strategy. People are usually not good in counting, computers are better fit. So no surprise.
- TrunkleBob 9y ago
  The page from the team that completed the proof: http://www.cube20.org/ http://www.cube20.org/
- DSMan195276 9y ago

566d8d6 9y ago

"By an odd coincidence, at least two other people were independently inspired at about the same time" I wasn't aware that there had been other cubes ( at least 1 using the same mechanism) invented independently, but this is a very common phenomenon. For example, calculus was independently invented by (at least) Newton and Leibniz. What's behind this phenomenon ? How is that different people, without communicated and in times gone by without any obvious common influences, imagine and invent the same concepts within the same timeframe ?

RangerScience 9y ago
From what I know, it's a combination of prerequisites (can you manufacture this? can you conceive of it?) and pressures (what problems are most people facing?). There's also maybe some selection bias; most (all?) of us hadn't heard of the other two cubes, because they failed to catch on for various reasons; if a cube had been invented sooner, would we have ever heard of it?
animal531 9y ago
As a kid I enjoyed the Rubik snake which I could contort into interesting patterns. My brother who was a few years older had a few other cubes, such as some with many more angled faces etc. As for cooperative invention, it would seem that humans are not as unique as we think we are. In exactly the same way we have doppelgangers that look like we do, we also have people that overlap with us in behaviour, personality and ideas. Side by side invention is just one facet of that.
- 566d8d6 9y ago
  I like that idea of "mental doppelgangers"!