Physicists Designed a Quantum Rubik's Cube and Found the Best Way to Solve It

Quantum physics already feels like a puzzle, but now scientists have made it more literal. A team of mathematicians from the University of Colorado Boulder has designed a quantum Rubik's cube, with infinite possible states and some weird new moves available to solve it. The classic (and classical) Rubik's cube is what's known as a permutation puzzle, which requires players to perform certain actions to rearrange one of a number of possible permutations into a 'solved' state. In the case of the infamous cube, that's around 43 quintillion possible combinations of small colored blocks being sorted into six, consistently-colored faces through a series of constrained movements. But a quantum Rubik's cube cranks that possibility space up to infinity. All it takes is to give the solver a new quantum action – the ability to move a piece into a quantum superposition where it is both moved and not moved at the same time. "With superpositions, the number of unique allowed states of the puzzle ... Read full article.