In my quest to embrace all things geek, I’m surprised that is has taken me so long to fall in love with this staple of geekdom. I am of course talking about the Rubiks cube.

I never had a rubiks cube growing up, sure I played with them but never at any length of time, or the intention of solving one.

The company that I currently work for had a developers conference and had some rubiks cubes with the company logo printed on them. After the conference, some of the left over cubes made their way into the hands of @BoringGeek, @LMajano, and myself. Nothing could have been crueler then handing some engineers a puzzle like a rubiks cube. I’m not going to lie, I physically lost sleep trying to solve the cube, but I had fun doing it.

I eventually broke down and started doing research on the rubiks cube and how to solve it. The more I learned about the cube, the more interested in it I became. I realized that solving the cube required pattern recognition and the implementation of algorithms through a series of motions. It was at that point in my mind that my computer science mindset kicked in and I started to make the cube do what I wanted instead of being surprised by what happened. I was in control of feeding the variables into the function and the function would produce a predictable and consistent result.

I can now solve the cube consistently, and typically around 3 minutes, a far cry from the speed cubing champions of the world, but I’m still proud of myself and continue to have fun solving the cube.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGUWBwg1JDo[/youtube]