Living: Hot-Selling Hungarian Horror

Rubik 's Cube is good for 43.2 quintillion headaches

By any measure, Büvös Kocka is the hottest number to come out of Budapest since the Gabor girls went West. Büvös Kocka means Magic Cube, but out side Hungary it is better known as Rubik's Cube, after its inventor, Ernö Rubik.

The device is also sometimes called the Hungarian Horror, since it can induce temporary dementia in otherwise balanced citizens. It has become, in the words of a senior buyer for FAO Schwarz, the Manhattan toy emporium, "the world's most asked-for plaything." It can also be an obsession, an infuriation and an invitation to insomnia, distracting workers from their jobs, students from their theses, even lovers from love. Scholars compare it to Sam Loyd's puzzle, an 1873 American invention that was said to have driven 1,500 people to insanity.

Thanks to modern mass marketing, the lunacy quotient may be far higher with the cube. Ideal Toy Corp., which makes the cube under an agreement with a Hungarian state manufacturing company, produced 4.5 million last year (retail price: $6 to $10) and expects to sell far more in 1981. Other companies are manufacturing and distributing versions of the cube, while pirated editions are being turned out in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

It looks innocuous enough—a brightly colored plastic widget that could have been designed by Mondrian. It was developed in 1974 by Rubik, then 37, an architecture professor, to give his students greater experience in dealing with three-dimensional objects. It has six sides, each with a different bright color. Each side is divided into three rows, each row into three smaller cubes ("cubies"). Each row can be made to rotate 360° so that one can twiddle the cube from top to bottom or from side to side.

When the three-by-three-by-three cube comes out of the box, all nine squares on each face are aligned to make a solid color—one face red, one yellow, and so on. The aim of the game is to scramble the colors (simple) and then to manipulate them back the way they were (not simple). The number of potential color patterns is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000, and it would take the most advanced computer 1.4 million years to figure out all the possible combinations.

Douglas R. Hofstadter, an assistant professor of computer science at Indiana University and Pulitzer-prizewinning author (Gödel, Escher, Bach), writes in the March issue of Scientific American: "If you are destined to solve the unscrambling problem at all, it will take you somewhere between five hours and a year." Among other hazards, Hofstadter lists Cubitis magikia, "a severe mental disorder accompanied by itching of the fingertips that can be relieved only by prolonged contact" with the cube. Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, a former mayor of Manchester, England, had to be operated on for tendinitis of the thumb after a protracted cube-twisting session. A woman in West Germany who gave her husband the cube for Christmas is seeking a divorce because of it. Her complaint: "My husband hardly speaks to me. He even shuts himself up when we have visitors. And when he comes to bed he is too exhausted from playing with his cube to even give me a cuddle." If it had been invented in his day, Nero would undoubtedly have twiddled while Rome burned.