Octacube
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Octacube (by Mindscope) is a type of mind-teaser puzzle made up of eight cubes with colors on the faces. The object of the puzzle is to arrange the eight cubes into a 2x2x2 cube such that all faces show the same color and all internal colors which touch are the same color. There are six colors in the puzzle, and each of the eight cubes shows the six colors, one per face.
There is some clever mathematics behind this puzzle. It turns out that for the above stated constraints, there are only two possible solutions, and they happen to made up of the same eight cubes. It also turns out that these eight cubes must all have in common three pairs of adjacent colors. This condition, in fact, is both necessary and sufficient to yield the set of cubes giving the two solutions.
