My friend bought me this cube for my birthday. It says that it can make a billion shapes. I'm curious how accurate that is

  • Well, technically, two pieces of wood and a single hinge can make a practically infinite number of shapes. Just tinier and tinier fractions of a degree.

    I say practically instead of literally infinite because there probably is some nonsense with the planck length I'm not smart enough to understand.

    I figured it would be something like that. I was also curious if they counted one block as a separate shape then two and 3 so on. Then I was curious what the "number" of shapes would be if you just added one more block. But I think you might be right

    Booooo (I agree)

    I know, I'm a dirty pedant.

    So when i close a door, it went through an infinite ammount of degrees until it closed?

    Literally yes.

    Well these are magnetic so there is a limit to stable configurations, I assume they snap in position.

    Let’s say each piece can connect to another in 6 different ways.

    Then a line would approximately be 512, or 244 million.

    This doesn’t include shapes with multiple arms.

    If each piece is a unique then a line would be 12! (479 million) x 512.

    It’s easy to see how this gets into the billions

    Factorial of 12 is 479001600

    This action was performed by a bot.

    Good bot. What is 43? ?

    Termial of 43 is 946

    This action was performed by a bot.

    If it were referring to continuous transformations discretized by something like a planck's length, then it would be an extremely vastly larger number than a billion

    In context, it is referring to discrete positions. Think of the states of a rubik's cube. It's like that; people care about the discrete states, not the countless continuous ones.

  • Funny enough my daughter has one of these and it was sitting on the coffee table when I got home from work today. It was a perfect square when I picked it up. I fiddled with it for 10 minutes and thought “well that’s pretty cool…” I then tried to return it to the square. An hour later I gave up. I can’t verify the “billion” claim, but I can verify that’s it’s a lot.

  • I'd imagine a billion easily. I don't know how to figure the math for more complex shapes. It says 12 shapes. Just lining those up in a row gets you almost 500 million options. (12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1= 479,001,600)

  • “Dozens of cool, interesting shapes, with hours of fun for the whole family!” vs. “Billions of shapes, given an eternity.”

  • I mean 6 lego 2 by 4s have like 915,103,765 combinations so probably

  • I’m about to make a brand new shape, one that’s never been done before.

    Whenever you shuffle a deck of cards.

  • Is this a [Self] post or a [Request] post?

    This is my first time posting. I wasn't sure what to tag it as.