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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Every Rubik's Cube is Solvable in 20 Moves or Less

There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible varying positions for the Rubik’s Cube. A team of mathematicians and programmers determined that all of them can be solved within 20 moves:
With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube™, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves.
Every solver of the Cube uses an algorithm, which is a sequence of steps for solving the Cube. One algorithm might use a sequence of moves to solve the top face, then another sequence of moves to position the middle edges, and so on. There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves.

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