Superflip

September 2014 : Solution

This month’s puzzle, as suggested by the colors of the letters, had to do with Rubiks Cubes. The title, “superflip“, is also the Rubiks Cube position from which it takes the most moves (20) to produce a fully-solved cube. If you were to take a Rubiks Cube with the letters as given, and turn it from a solved cube into a superflip, the faces would read out “What is the number of stickers on a Rubiks Cube squared then cubed”, which leads to this month’s answer, 24,794,911,296.

Congratulations to the dozen of you who solved this month’s puzzle, especially Ryan Brown, this month’s randomly-chosen winner of a Jane Street t-shirt!