Rubik's Cube Competition

jm sent out information regarding an upcoming event (don't be shocked at how nerdy we are.. =) http://www.exploratorium.edu/pr/documents/06-1Rubik's.html

little FAQs on Rubik's

• In 1980, Ideal Toys considered renaming the Magic Cube 'The Gordian Knot'! Then somebody suggested 'Rubik's Cube' - and the rest is history!
• Over 100 million Rubik's Cubes were sold in the period 1980-1982.
• The ultimate collectable of 1981 in Britain was a Rubik's Cube showing Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.
• G. L. Honaker, Jr., discovered that the number of different unsolved configurations that can be reached on the original Rubik's Cube is a prime number!
• "Easiest color to solve on a Rubik's Cube? black. Simply remove all the little colored stickers on the cube, and each side of the cube will now be the original color of the plastic underneath - black. According to the instructions, this means the puzzle is solved." - Steve Rubenstein
• The Cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different possible configurations. One, and only one, of these possibilities presents the 'solved' Cube, having a single color on each of its 6 sides. If you allow one second for each turn, it would take you 1400 million million years to go through ALL the possible configurations. In comparison, the whole universe is only 14 thousand million years old.
• The least number of moves required in unscrambling the Cube from the worst disorder, the shortest route, is often called God's Algorithm. Morwen Thistlethwaite, using computers at South Bank University in London, calculated that the magical minimum was 52 moves. A number subsequently reduced to 50. It is thought that the number of moves may turn out to be somewhere in the low twenties.
• The World RUBIK Cube championship was held in Budapest on June 5, 1982. The US Champion won by solving the Cube in of 22.95 seconds. The world record, in competitive conditions, grew progressively lower and now stands at 16.5 seconds.
• According to some calculations, one in every three households possessed at least one RUBIK's Cube. A recent survey shows over 85% of the US population is aware of the Rubik name and shows a clear recognition of the Cube.
• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) established a regular series of 'Cube-ins' for its staff and students to explore the various mathematical ramifications created by RUBIK's Cube.
• Frau Schmidt of Dusseldorf in Germany, sued her husband for divorce in 1981 citing the Cube as correspondent. She complained: 'Gundar no longer speaks to me and when he comes to bed he is too exhausted from playing with his Cube to even give me a cuddle'.
• At the Edinburgh Conference of European leaders in 1992, John Major, the British Premier, used RUBIK's Cube to explain to his TV audience the virtually insoluble complexities of the Maastricht Treaty.
• Apart from the hundreds of Cubes with different surface decoration, over 60 self-contained, 3D puzzles with various geometries and moving parts, came to market between 1981 and 1984. ALL of them derived fundamentally from the original RUBIK's Cube. No other single toy had anywhere near the kind of impact on the Toy Industry, ever.