A three dimensional twisty puzzle is usually made of a
set of pieces that can
change their position through a group of operations, obtaining different combinations. Physically, the rearrangement of positions is done through the rotation (twist) of some pieces around a point of the polyhedron (which may represent one of the pieces of the puzzle), which is usually located at the center of a face or a corner.
Often the puzzle pieces have one or more colors and the solved state is represented by the position in which each face of the polyhedron contains pieces of a
single color.
A puzzle with intricate mechanisms such as the Rubik'
s Magic Cube, Fisher Puzzle, Rubik'
s Revenge, Pocket Cube, Pyraminx, Dodecahedron, Megaminx,
Square-1, Skewb,
Void, Floppy Cube, 7x7x7, and others.
Many are used in competitions regulated by The World Cube Association (WCA).
The original twisty puzzle, The Rubik'
s Magic
Cube (3x3x3) has 43 Quintillion permutations. That'
s 43 followed by eighteen zeroes! The current world record is under five seconds.
