Suppose you are a person who loves solving puzzles. In that case, I’m sure you have given the Rubik’s cube a try! Dr. Jonathan Kinlay is a founding partner of the Innovation Factory, is giving us a similar but more head-cracking cube that will stimulate your logic even further.
Unlike the Rubik’s Cube, all of the faces on the Magic Cube are the same color, making it much more challenging to find the correct configuration. Adding to the complexity, several of the numbers appear on more than one face. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? Keeping in mind the complexity of the puzzle, its makers have provided us with online assistance.
There is an online solution software that will solve the Magic Cube from an initial starting position. The application is designed to run on any browser. This application allows you to solve the puzzle at your own pace. It finds the shortest number of moves required to return the Magic Cube to its original configuration.
It displays each turn in an animated sequence, accompanied by an explanatory description. The user can pause the animation or move backward or forwards through the sequence of steps by tapping the left or right arrows.
Let us now take a closer look at the mechanism of the puzzle. It is based on Prime Number Series – A prime number is a whole number greater than one and has exactly two factors: 1 and itself. These are the first nine prime numbers in an infinite series, Fibonacci Series. To obtain each number of the series, you add the two numbers that came before it.
Each number in the series is the sum of the two numbers preceding it, Triangle Series; this exponentially expanding set of numbers is generated from a pattern of dots that form an equilateral triangle.
By adding another row of dots, you can find the next number of the sequence, Magic Square; a magic square is an arrangement of numbers in a square grid, where the numbers in each row, column, and diagonal add up to 15, Digits of Pi – Pi is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter and Digits of E, Euler’s number is a mathematical constant, an irrational number, and one of the most important numbers in mathematics.
Within little time of sharing the premier video with a speedcubing community, the makers of the Magic Cube found its first solver – Jason Bohanon! He solved it before even getting a cube and sent us a video of his solution. You can check it in the video that follows. Now, let’s find out a little about the creator of this unique puzzle.
Dr. Jonathan Kinlay is a founding partner of the Innovation Factory, inspired by the vision of enabling designers and entrepreneurs to invent, design, and prototype new product ideas rapidly and at a low cost through the application of new modeling and manufacturing technologies.
Dr. Kinlay is the founder of Systematic Strategies, a systematic hedge fund that deploys high-frequency trading strategies using news-based algorithms. He was the General Partner of the Caissa Capital hedge fund, which managed over $400M in assets using volatility arbitrage algorithms developed by Dr. Kinlay’s research firm, Investment Analytics.
Dr. Kinlay established Proteom Capital, whose trading algorithms were based on pattern recognition techniques used in DNA sequencing. Dr. Kinlay was formerly a Managing Director of the US investment bank Bear Stearns.
Dr. Kinlay holds a Ph.D. in economics and has held positions on New York University’s Stern School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, and Reading University. He surely is a talented man. Won’t you agree with me?
