It's Called a Hypercube Because it Makes You Hyper

I have been trying to resist getting a new Rubik's Cube for some time now. I actually still have the first one I bought at The Three Counties Show in about 1980 - I think I still have the clear, plastic cylinder and display base in which it came as well. However, the last time I found it while supposedly cleaning out the attic or the garage, I found that the cover for the central white square was missing and while that doesn't actually stop the puzzle being solvable, it does not quite look right. So on Friday I actually got a new one, injected it with WD40 to loosen it up (we used to use butter and Fairy Liquid in the old days) and set about solving it. Strangely, I can still remember enough of the moves to do the first two layers without having to look at the solution. Reading the final moves I can solve the whole thing in about two minutes. All I have to do now is memorise the final sequences. It never stays solved for long - daughter is trying to learn how to do it herself and son just likes scrambling it up and holding it up saying "do that for me please".

Obviously I have not set about working it out from scratch and have used a solution so this news fills me with horror. 26 years is just too long. Our deputy-head girl worked out how to solve it without using any solution and she took about a week but she worked out artillery equations on her programmable calculator as well. I think this was a brushed-steel Casio whereas mine was a boring Commodore PR50 which lost everything when it was switched off, though I did have a plush velvet case made from spare bits of a new sofa cover. I worked out a method for converting decimal to binary in the 24 steps it allowed. The Casio was so much better - (though we never actually aimed for anything living). All this awesome power led us on to writing out BASIC programs on coding sheets and submitting them to the County Council computer department so that they could tell us we had a syntax error. When they eventually ran successfully, we would get a classic A3 sheet with the green stave lines showing the results and a little roll of punch tape with the code on it.