Been struggling with that Rubik's Cube that your friend/enemy/relation bought you? Got it to two layers perfect but the third just won't come right? Consider this: any Rubik's Cube can be solved in 26 moves or less, according to Dan Cunkle and Gene Cooperman at Northeastern University, Boston.
It took a supercomputer (of course!) but also some reduction: apparently there are 43 quintillion configurations for the cube (that's 43 million billion).
Of course, some of those are the same and some can be solved quickly. They got it to 29 moves, and then - aiming to beat the previous demonstrated record, of 27 moves - reduced it to just 80 million configurations to try to solve in 26 moves or fewer.
Their paper (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/gene/papers/rubik.pdf) details how it's done.
Read more at the Math Trek blog and Science Daily.
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