Pocket Cube court affirmed the judgment that Rubik's 2×2×2 Pocket Cube infringed Nichols's patent, but overturned the judgment on Rubik's 3×3×3 Cube. Any permutation of the eight corners is possible (8! positions), and seven of them can be independently rotated (3 positions). There is nothing identifying the orientation of the cube in space, reducing the positions by a factor of 24. This is because all 24 possible positions and orientations of the first corner are equivalent due to the lack of fixed centers. This factor does not appear when calculating the permutations of N×N×N cubes where N is odd, since those puzzles
8-cube 8-cube In geometry, an 8-cube is an eight-dimensional hypercube (8-cube). It has 256 vertices, 1024 edges, 1792 square faces, 1792 cubic cells, 1120 tesseract 4-faces, 448 5-cube 5-faces, 112 6-cube 6-faces, and 16 7-cube 7-faces. It is represented by Schläfli symbol {4,3}, being composed of 3 7-cubes around each 6-face. It is called an octeract, a portmanteau of tesseract (the "4-cube") and "oct" for eight (dimensions) in Greek. It can also be called a regular hexdeca-8-tope or hexadecazetton, being an 8-dimensional polytope constructed from 16 regular facets. It is a part of an infinite family of polytopes, called hypercubes. The