Puzzle Description:

A Rubik's Cube, unsolved. Actually, besides being a bit ugly and having too few colors, I think it may be unsolvable.

#1: Patty Smith (pezgrl) on Jan 11, 2005

nope, not unsolvable. :)

I'm no expert at Rubik's cubes, never having succumbed to that particular addiction, but it's certainly possible to draw a picture of a Rubik's cube that can't be solved. I made some effort here: The three visible center squares are all different colors, there aren't more than four white sides or corners (there is a lot of white to make the puzzle interesting as a PBN puzzle). But my guess would be that the majority of randomly drawn pictures of Rubik's cubes would not actually be solvable ones.

Nice puzzle. I couldn't figgure out what it was until the very end.

this is a really cool picture to solve.

well, a bit weird looking rubik's cube, but cool anyway

A Rubik's cube with only 4 colors might be easier to solve. 2 of the sides would have to be the same color, so some of the squares would be able to go in more than one place, no?

That must have taken a fair amount of time to create.

A fun solve.

Well, there's my usual gripe about blue and green having to be on opposing faces. ;-) But that's not really relevant here, since the intent was to create an unsolvable cube.

Assuming it's a 6-color cube (and we just can't see the other 2 colors from this angle), then there can only be 9 tiles of a certain color. I count 11 white tiles. (I took my socks off to help me count to 11.) :-P So, yeah, I'd say it's unsolvable. Therefore, mission accomplished & well done! :-)

With about 43 quintillion possible combinations (43 million million million) on a Rubik's Cube 3x3, there might be a slight chance a randomly drawn cube could stumble into being solvable. As the saying goes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. :-D

wow, a caveman wearing socks... :-D

Made from mammoth hide. Bulky. But warm. :-)

It's not unsolvable, but impossible, because a Rubik's cube has got exactly nine squares of the same colour. This one has got 11 white sqares!
I met Ernő Rubik personally on a local cube-solving competition (1980-81), where I was the bronz medallist, and he was the donator of prizes. Yes, the prize was that dedicated Rubik's cube, which I solved... :)

At a party recently, a friend of mine picked up my son's Rubik cube and started fiddling with it. I admired her facility with the cube and mentioned that I'd never really mastered it, but had read John Conway's analysis of it in his gorgeous book, "Winning Ways." And she says, "Oh, I'm mentioned in that book." It turned out she'd never actually seen the book though. I was able to pull it off my bookshelf and find the page where a particularly clever combination of moves was attributed to her. Apparently she used to hang out with Conway as a teen. I was wildly impressed. John Conway is a major deity in the pantheon of mathematicians who study games.

as Genuine says, there are 11 whites. Had one white corner been black and one white edge been black, it would be solvable. Otherwise 2 faces would have to be white when solved...

There are actually 5 white corners & 5 white edges. But that's OK. My "Unsolved Puzzle" #10301 is also unsolvable. (I made that puzzle in Sept 2010, 5½ years after this one And I never saw this one 'til today, 7½ years after that.) The reason mine isn't is a bit more complicated, though.

Random trivia: The same Rubik's cube that Jan mentioned in #13 is sitting right here next to my keyboard. It's currently solved and then twisted into a pattern that has diagonal stripes of squares going up four of the sides, with the squares in a plus-shape on the top and bottom.

I have no idea which friend he is talking about, but it would have to be someone I've met.

That sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out which friend and which party. I asked my son James, and we did some puzzling over it together. Jan wrote that the friend picked up our son [Arlo]'s Rubik's cube, and that Jan looked through a book Jan owned, which means that the party must have been at our house. I couldn't think of a party that we would have hosted at that time. So I looked back in our digital calendar to see what we were doing in September of 2013. I started at September 9, 2013, the date of Jan's comment, and worked my way earlier to May without finding any mention of a party at our house. Then I went back to September of 2013 and worked my way backward again, still without finding it.

Maybe he was thinking of the New Year's Eve party that we had thrown at the start of 2013? Maybe!

Anyway, I'm sure that when Jan wrote that he never anticipated that it would be a mini-mystery that nine years in the future would send someone down a rabbit hole of trying to solve it like a puzzle.

So the name of this puzzle applies to Jan's comment.

An update, though probably only interesting to me and not to anybody else: I asked about this on my Facebook page, to see if anybody there knew who the person was or which party it was. It turns out that the person is Margaret Bumby. I'm still not sure what party it was.

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