Researchers: Rubik's Cube solvable in 20 moves or less - — 12
August, 2010 08:32 Any Rubik's Cube configuration can be solved
in 20 moves or fewer, according to new research. The recent
puzzle-based findings come from a small group of researchers,
including a university mathematician and a Google engineer.
Collectively they found that every single one of a Rubik's
Cube's massive 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 combinations can be
solved in just 20 moves or less. This staggeringly small number
of moves, known as God's Number, was found to be accurate thanks
to the help of 35 years worth of computing time--time which was
spent number crunching. According to the research, the intensive
number crunching, which was completed by Google's own computers,
broke the problem down into smaller problems. As the researchers
put it on their site, "We broke the problem down into
2,217,093,120 smaller problems, each comprising 19,508,428,800
different positions. Each of these subproblems was small enough
to fit in the memory of a