Four By Four
Friday, November 17th, 2006Who’d have believed that someone would be crazy enough to attempt a four by four by four Rubik’s cube puzzle? We, the intrepid developers here at IRL Online, have attempted just such a feat. It needs to be said, however, that no one has finished the 4³ cube. I think it might actually take a miracle from the Flying Spaghetti Monster (RAmen) before anyone will have the time, inclination, or ability to finish it. I’d say though, that of the possible contenders, Nicto’s got the best chance at doing so.
I sat down with the 3³ cube in an attempt to solve the puzzle like I had done during my childhood. Yet I came to the conclusion that I have either become stupid as I’ve aged, or I’ve become super-duper smart and can no longer function on such menial levels as those proposed by the three by three by three. I was unable and, more importantly, unwilling to attempt to solve the puzzle myself. I passed the buck.
While it’s true that my parents furnished me with a Rubik’s Cube as a boy, just as millions of other parents have done for millions of their children since the eighties, and while it’s true that I did solve the puzzle in short order, I think my younger self was a more astute puzzle solver than my current self. Oh, to be young again. My unwillingness to attempt the solution now might stem from the fact that I faced the most unsolvable reiteration of the cube ever known.
When my mother saw my completed cube, she worried that I had solved it too quickly and urged me to try again. She quickly resorted, reshuffled, twisted, and turned the cube so that it was once again as it had been when I released it from it’s plastic bindings. Except it wasn’t. She had mutated the cube into an angry, asymmetrical polyhedron the likes of which no child has ever seen before or since. The cube very nearly took on a life of its own as it bent at angles that the inner cubes were not meant to bend. It turned from a Rubik’s Cube into a Rubik’s Dodecahedron-Antiprism Hybrid.
Despite my amazement at this new puzzle and the daunting challenge at which the original form would have trembled, at the time I was ill-prepared to face my impending inability to solve the mystery mass before me. At first, I spent days on end working the new abomination in an attempt to merely get it back to cube form, let alone back to that special place where all six sides had a different color. The days soon turned to weeks, then months and years. I revisited the mutation even as late as high school to see what could be done, but alas, it was not to be.
Mind you, I don’t blame my mother for this; I blame myself. It became clear to me that I was not meant to profess as a plastic surgeon.