Ernő Rubik on why his famous cube is a “metaphor” for the human condition | Hacker News Reader

Ernő Rubik on why his famous cube is a “metaphor” for the human condition

salon.com

42 pointspseudolus26 comments

Completely unrelated to the article itself, but I find the umlauts in the name super fascinating. I was previously not aware that double acute was a thing that was used and that it's distinct from using diaeresis. In short, I didn't know ő and ö are different characters that separately exist and it's really neat.

Fun fact: it only exists in Hungarian and it's even called as "hungarumlaut" in typography. (It's kind of pronounced as longer ö.) Usually it's missing from custom fonts unfortunately, which can make some Hungarian websites ugly.

Actually ö, with two little round dots, (and ä, ü and their uppercase counterparts for that matter) can both be umlaut (über) and diaeresis (argüer) depending on context.

The difference is important because some collations should distinguish between the two cases and put them in different places when sorting. Another difference is that in traditional fine typography sometimes different sorts were used for the two cases. The umlaut should have the dots closer to the letter body than the diaeresis. Yannis Haralambous writes about these topics in his O'Reilly book Fonts & Encodings, especially about the fact that Unicode can't really express this nuances and if I remember correctly that some software uses the order of combining diacritical marks to encode the difference.

In addition in the case of the U with diaeresis in some languages it means the vowel is sounded and not silent as opposed to indicating independent syllable. An O with diaeresis in English means it’s a separate vowel in a double vowel orthography where traditionally the two vowels represent one sound (chicken coop vs chicken farm coöp.)

That's interesting! Never thought that the meaning of the two dots should affect the sort order and that it is not possible to represent with Unicode.

If there are previous examples of the two rendered differently, I think that makes a pretty good case for extending Unicode.

There's also "ű". In Hungarian, the text "árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép" is used to test all special characters.

...and is also a nice way to showcase Hungarian's ability to concatenate words, similar to German (it means "flood-proof mirror drilling machine").

If anyone's interested, the double acute means that the vowel is longer than a regular ö or ü (there's no ä in Hungarian BTW). Same for á é í ó ú, with the added complication that a and e are pronounced differently.

...and kudos to salon for getting Rubik's name right!

Paul Erdős is a well-known name containing an ő.

Off-topic, but there's a great documentary "The Speed Cubers" that covers competitive cubing. It's very well produced, and an ejoyable watch. https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81092143

It's amazing how prevalent the Rubik's Cube was for a while back in the 80s-90s despite the fact that the vast majority of them just ended up sitting on shelves. Statistically only 1 out of every 20 Rubik's Cube owners can actually solve the puzzle[0] that took Rubik himself an entire month to solve. [0]https://www.ontheclock.com/Blog/Business-is-like-a-Rubiks-Cu...

> that took Rubik himself an entire month to solve

I'm not sure you what you mean by this, but Rubik discovered an algorithm to solve the cube, he didn't follow instructions like what the 1 out 20 of cube owners do.

It'd be interesting to know the percentage of the people that have discovered an algorithm by themselves to solve the cube.

What is the difference between instructions and an algorithm in this case?

I guess the parent poster means that Rubik did not have an existing solution to follow, and his one month meant solving it without any external assistance.

(I'm not sure how his invention process went exactly, but I would guess that he probably did not start with a physical device he could hold, so I'm not sure such comparisons are really meaningful. It may have been easier for him to solve, due to inside knowledge, or it may have been harder.)

Yes, that's what I meant.

In the cube solving world, movement sequences that arrange the cube in a specific way are called "algorithms". Each "algorithm" will solve part of the cube, the full solution being a sequence of "algorithms".

It's the same thing. I just used a different word.

> how prevalent the Rubik's Cube was for a while back in the 80s-90s

TIL the Rubik's Cube was a new invention and it didn't exist until the late 1970s. A big age revealer, I guess...

A bit tongue in cheek, it's a perfect metaphor for the human condition: it's a puzzle, it's hard and, in the end, it's pointless, the only reward being the journey itself and knowledge you won't really be able to use for anything else.

With luck, the problem solving neural pathways developed in the process can be useful for something else.

It is solvable.

Few non-trivial problems have that feature.

Typically, we maintain them.

And if you cheat it you gain nothing from it.

Knowing when to cheat - when to give up on one problem and solving another instead, is a valuable skill

Not if your goal is to impress your peers and win competitions!

> "If you are curious, you will find the puzzles around you. If you are determined, you will solve them."

bojler eladó

Mennyiért adja, jó uram?

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