[Quest:] The IMF's chief economist says the debt crisis in Europe is a complex puzzle. He actually had something in mind rather like this. Very complicated indeed. You get one side right, and then realize the rest is a big mess. Take this yellow bit, for example. I've nearly got it. And but well, you can imagine. You've pinned these things, Rubik's Cube. For our new series, Make, Create, Innovate, we sent Nick Glass to meet the man behind one of the best-selling products and, I might add, a product that I've singularly failed to ever manage to make any progress with at all, in history.
[Nick Glass, Cnn International Correspondent:] This is a stainless steel sculpture of the world's best-selling toy here in a park in Hungary. We know it better from the handheld version. And hundreds of millions of these can be found around the world.
[Glass:] It's named after the professor who first dreamt up the puzzle in 1974, although against his wishes. Erno Rubik didn't really want to be famous.
[Erno Rubik, Inventor, Rubik's Cube:] I was not keen to promote my name, but made a few more interesting than myself.
[Glass:] The Rubik's Cube, the toy of the 1980s, is now enjoying a revival, with 7 million sold last year.
[Rubik:] The relationship between people and the cube as an object, it remained the same.
[Glass:] A professor in interior design, Rubik first used the cube as a teaching aid.
[Rubik:] I believed the most characteristic part of the cube is the contradiction between simplicity and complexity. Personally, I loved geometry, because geometry is the knowledge of how the whole universe is structured.
[Glass:] The three-by-three cube consists of 27 cube faces. Color- coded, these can be arranged in 43 quintillion different ways. But there is only one solution. Did you think you had a marketable toy?
[Rubik:] I had the feeling. It's something that is very simple. It can be manufactured easily and can be a product that's available for others.
[Glass:] It went international in 1980.
[Rubik:] The cube made some kind of very exceptional height in the first two years, sold more than 100 million cubes. That is a very, very unusual thing in the toy market.
[Glass:] What is the internal mechanism? What makes it possible to rotate like this?
[Rubik:] The best thing is to discover, take it apart.
[Glass:] It's kind of magical, but it's also it has a mechanism.
[Rubik:] Yes. And a very simple mechanism. And because of that, there was potential to have mass production. So, it's a cheap product. Simple.
[Glass:] It has a beauty to it.
[Rubik:] Yes, it is.
[Glass:] The last few years have seen a rise in speed cubing competitions, demon cubers racing against each other and the clock. It's been proved that every cube can be solved in surprisingly just 20 moves or less if only it was that easy. Erno Rubik himself cannot compete with the young guns. It took him a month to crack it way back in 1974. And now? Are you a good Rubik Cube player?
[Rubik:] It for me, it was about one minute of my time when I was practicing. And the actual world record is 5-point-something seconds. Speed cubers usually are not my age. They are younger than I was when I made the cube.
[Glass:] Most toys come and go, but not Rubik's Cube. It's now almost 40 years old, and it's here to stay.
[Quest:] In that report, you heard the phrase "quintillion" used. That is 18 zeroes. I can honestly say I've never completed one of these at all. Erno Rubik, famously media shy, and if you'd like to read a transcript of that interview in full or watch it again, you can find it at cnn.commakecreateinnovate. I told you earlier what the IMF's chief economist called the debt crisis in Europe. We'll have Olivier Blanchard's full interview with CNN after the break.