The latest puzzle from Professor Rubik, the Rubik 360

Thirty years after Professor Rubik painted the Lament Configuration rainbow and decided to sell it to children in his native Hungary, everyone's loved the Rubik's Cube.

Now, Professor Rubik has invented a new puzzle: the Rubik 360. That's enough to get puzzle nuts in a jumble, but I'm a little skeptical. Here's the description:

Players must get the coloured balls from an inner sphere into matching slots on the outer sphere by shaking them through a middle sphere that has only two holes.

This sounds irritatingly like one of those cheap Crackerjack ball bearing mazes. I don't like puzzles that require the manual dexterity to manipulate the arc of small balls by tilt alone.

On the other hand, at least it sounds like this latest puzzle will lend itself to an iPhone port.

Rubik's Cube inventor is back with Rubik's 360 [Telegraph]

[#1 posted by rAMPANTiDIOCY , February 2, 2009 6:15 PM]

there's a great, standard (3x3x3) rubik's cube for the iphone that is free and easy to find with google.

[#2 posted by Gallox Smith , February 3, 2009 12:23 AM]

The telegraph article indicated the Rubik 360 would be released in August. Also, time.com will release a video of the 360 on 5th Feb.

The Rubik 360 will be launched at the World's Largest Annual Toy Fair takes place in Nuremberg, Germany. The 2009 show will celebrate 60 years of the International Toy Fair! So a great occasion if you ask me.

I am keeping track of the latest news on the Rubik 360 on my blog, http://www.360mad.com.

[#3 posted by Daemon , February 3, 2009 3:02 AM]

Bonus points for the subtle referance to what is probably Barker's most famous creation.

[#4 posted by arkizzle , February 3, 2009 10:24 AM]

@3

Ha! I never knew what it was called! Nice.

[#5 posted by cbcspark , February 4, 2009 10:50 AM]

We just spent a frustrating 10 minutes with it and it's impossible to solve.

...

Okay, maybe we'll give it another ten minutes.

Stop on by for our first look at it.