43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ways to scramble a cube, and you are never more than 20 moves from home.
breakdown of what’s happening:
• every scramble = a dot on a map
• every twist = a road between dots
• solving = calculating the fastest GPS route back to the start
in 2010, researchers (with computing donated by Google) proved every one of the 43 quintillion scrambles is within 20 moves of solved. no matter how badly you mess it up, 20 turns fixes it. they call it God's number.
so yes, it's basically Waze for cubes. the same graph math also routes your GPS, traces wallets on block explorers, and decides what your feed shows you next.
turns out we've all been doing graph theory daily. the cube is just the first time it looked this good 😍