There was an article in the newspaper this morning about the Rubik’s Cube and speed Rubik’s Cube solving.
I’ve never solved a Rubik’s Cube in my life.
Well, that’s actually a lie. I did. I took the sucker apart, and reassembled it into the correct configuration. That’s how an Engineer should solve those things.
But I digress. When I was younger, I thought that being able to solve a Rubik’s cube was the pinnacle of genius. I could never really solve it. I always dreamed of being able to effortlessly solve the stupid thing, but I, being occasionally lazy, never really got around to figuring out how to solve it. After a while, this went to the back of my head and I kinda didn’t think about it for at least a decade.
One of my co-workers can solve it. He showed me the rough techniques to do it. There’s not actually any intelligence behind it. They are mostly just following a predetermined algorithm very quickly. It’s basically like those mechanical problems where you have to push the little piece in some way that’s not immediately intuitive to solve the problem. Once you know the little movement or the correct algorithm, it’s a solved problem.
Which completely ruins the whole genius thing.