Make, Create, Innovate:  Rubik's Revolution
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.</s>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.</s>GLASS (voice-over): 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.</s>ERNO RUBIK, INVENTOR, RUBIK'S CUBE: I was not keen to promote my name, but made a few more interesting than myself.</s>GLASS: The Rubik's Cube, the toy of the 1980s, is now enjoying a revival, with 7 million sold last year.</s>RUBIK: The relationship between people and the cube as an object, it remained the same.</s>GLASS: A professor in interior design, Rubik first used the cube as a teaching aid.</s>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.</s>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.</s>GLASS (on camera): Did you think you had a marketable toy?</s>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.</s>GLASS (voice-over): It went international in 1980.</s>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.</s>GLASS (on camera): What is the internal mechanism? What makes it possible to rotate like this?</s>RUBIK: The best thing is to discover, take it apart.</s>GLASS: It's kind of magical, but it's also -- it has a mechanism.</s>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.</s>GLASS: It has a beauty to it.</s>RUBIK: Yes, it is.</s>GLASS (voice-over): 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?</s>GLASS (on camera): Are you a good Rubik Cube player?</s>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.</s>GLASS: Most toys come and go, but not Rubik's Cube. It's now almost 40 years old, and it's here to stay.</s>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.com/makecreateinnovate. 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.