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
Nine-Colour Cube one corner, one edge and one face centre each. The puzzle has eight corner pieces, which can be permutated in 8! different ways, and twelve edge pieces, which can be permutated in 12! ways. The position of the face centre pieces is fixed, therefore there is only one possible permutation for the face centres. Since all cubies only consist of one colour (unlike on the Rubik's Cube), they have no visible orientation and therefore this is not taken into account. The exact number of combinations is not yet reached because of several constraints: As some pieces are identical to each