Soma cube Soma cube The Soma cube is a solid dissection puzzle invented by Piet Hein in 1933 during a lecture on quantum mechanics conducted by Werner Heisenberg. Its name is alleged to be derived from the fictitious drug "soma" consumed as a pastime by the establishment in Aldous Huxley's dystopic novel "Brave New World". Seven pieces made out of unit cubes must be assembled into a 3×3×3 cube. The pieces can also be used to make a variety of other 3D shapes. The pieces of the Soma cube consist of all possible combinations of three or four unit cubes, joined at
Helicopter Cube number of permutations is reduced to 24!/(4!) arrangements. The reducing factor comes about because there are 24 (4!) ways to arrange the four pieces of a given colour. This is raised to the sixth power because there are six colours. This gives a total number of permutations of The expanded number is (approximately trillion or 12 trilliard on the long scale or 12 sextillion on the short scale) To count non-cube positions, we need to count all the possible shapes (ignoring the colours). Counting those shapes is tricky, since sometimes moves are blocked purely due to the shape of the