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Rubik’s Tube

James Grime, cubing hard

Numberphile filmmaker and general internet legend Brady Haran has been busy putting together a series of YouTube videos about the Rubik’s cube, with contributions from Aperiodical friends Matt Parker and James Grime. The videos also feature lots of solving clips sent in by viewers, and Aperiodical Editor triumvir and sometime maths-talker-abouter Katie Steckles (that’s me) occasionally pops in to make comments and state facts which are no longer true (a world record was broken 4 days after filming).

The series includes a video about the number 43,252,003,274,489,856,000, which is the order of the Rubik’s cube group (with excellent group theory from group theorist James); the number 20, which is sometimes called ‘God’s Number‘ and is the maximum minimum number of moves needed to solve a cube (aka the diameter of the Cayley graph of the Rubik’s cube group with the natural generating set); and also one about Superflip, the most hardest & difficultest scramble of a cube to solve, and one which does actually take at least the full 20 moves.

The whole collection of videos was released on 7th September, and can be found in this playlist.

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