Piet Hein of Denmark, also known for his invention of the mathematical games known as hex and tac tix, stumbled upon the fact that all the irregular shapes that can be formed by combining three or four congruent cubes joined at their faces can be put together to form a larger cube. There are exactly seven such shapes, called Soma Cubes; they are shown in Figure 20. No two shapes are alike, although the fifth and sixth are mirror images of each other. The fact that these seven pieces (comprising 27 “unit” cubes) can be reassembled to form one large cube is indeed remarkable.

Many interesting solid shapes can be formed from the seven Soma Cubes, shapes resembling, for example, a sofa, a chair, a castle, a tunnel, a pyramid, and so on. Even the assembling of the seven basic pieces into a large cube can be done in more than 230 essentially different ways.

As a recreation, the Soma Cubes are fascinating. With experience, many persons find that they can solve Soma problems mentally. Psychologists who have used them find that the ability to solve Soma problems is roughly correlated with general intelligence, although there are some strange anomalies at both ends of the distribution of intelligence. In any event, people playing with the cubes do not appear to want to stop; the variety of interesting structures possible seems endless.

Coloured squares and cubes

There is a wide variety of puzzles involving coloured square tiles and coloured cubes. In one, the object is to arrange the 24 three-colour patterns, including repetitions, that can be obtained by subdividing square tiles diagonally, using three different colours, into a 4 × 6 rectangle so that each pair of touching edges is the same colour and the entire border of the rectangle is the same colour.

More widely known perhaps is the 30 Coloured Cubes Puzzle. If six colours are used to paint the faces there result 2,226 different combinations. If from this total only those cubes that bear all six colours on their faces are selected, a set of 30 different cubes is obtained; two cubes are regarded as “different” if they cannot be placed side by side so that all corresponding faces match. Many fascinating puzzles arise from these coloured squares and cubes; many more could be devised. Some of them have appeared commercially at various times under different names, such as the Mayblox Puzzle, the Tantalizer, and the Katzenjammer.

A revival of interest in coloured-cube problems was aroused by the appearance of a puzzle known as Instant Insanity, consisting of four cubes, each of which has its faces painted white, red, green, and blue in a definite scheme. The puzzle is to assemble the cubes into a 1 × 1 × 4 prism such that all four colours appear on each of the four long faces of the prism. Since each cube admits of 24 different orientations, there are 82,944 possible prismatic arrangements; of these only two are the required solutions.

This puzzle was soon superseded by Rubik’s Cube, developed independently by Ernő Rubik (who obtained a Hungarian patent in 1975) and Terutoshi Ishigi (who obtained a Japanese patent in 1976). The cube appears to be composed of 27 smaller cubes, or cubelets; in its initial state, each of the six faces of the cube is made up of nine cubelet faces all of the same colour. In the commercial versions of the puzzle, an internal system of pivots allows any layer of nine cubelets to be rotated with respect to the rest, so that successive rotations about the three axes cause the cubelet faces to become scrambled. The challenge of restoring a scrambled cube to its original configuration is formidable, inasmuch as more than 10¹⁹ states can be reached from a given starting condition. A thriving literature quickly developed for the exposition of systematic solutions (based on group theory) of scrambled cubes.

Nim and similar games

A game so old that its origin is obscure, nim lends itself nicely to mathematical analysis. In its generalized form, any number of objects (counters) are divided arbitrarily into several piles. Two people play alternately; each, in turn, selects any one of the piles and removes from it all the objects, or as many as he chooses, but at least one object. The player removing the last object wins. Every combination of the objects may be considered “safe” or “unsafe”; i.e., if the position left by a player after his move assures a win for that player, the position is called safe. Every unsafe position can be made safe by an appropriate move, but every safe position is made unsafe by any move. To determine whether a position is safe or unsafe, the number of objects in each pile may be expressed in binary notation: if each column adds up to zero or an even number, the position is safe. For example, if at some stage of the game, three piles contain 4, 9, and 15 objects, the calculation is:

Since the second column from the right adds up to 1, an odd number, the given combination is unsafe. A skillful player will always move so that every unsafe position left to him is changed to a safe position.

A similar game is played with just two piles; in each draw the player may take objects from either pile or from both piles, but in the latter event he must take the same number from each pile. The player taking the last counter is the winner.

Games such as nim make considerable demands upon the player’s ability to translate decimal numbers into binary numbers and vice versa. Since digital computers operate on the binary system, however, it is possible to program a computer (or build a special machine) that will play a perfect game. Such a machine was invented by American physicist Edward Uhler Condon and an associate; their automatic Nimatron was exhibited at the New York World’s Fair in 1940.

Games of this sort seem to be widely played the world over. The game of pebbles, also known as the game of odds, is played by two people who start with an odd number of pebbles placed in a pile. Taking turns, each player draws one, or two, or three pebbles from the pile. When all the pebbles have been drawn, the player who has an odd number of them in his possession wins.

Predecessors of these games, in which players distribute pebbles, seeds, or other counters into rows of holes under varying rules, have been played for centuries in Africa and Asia and are known as mancala games.