Diabolical cube Diabolical cube The diabolical cube is a three-dimensional dissection puzzle consisting of six polycubes (shapes formed by gluing cubes together face to face) that can be assembled together to form a single 3 × 3 × 3 cube. The six pieces are: one dicube, one tricube, one tetracube, one pentacube, one hexacube and one heptacube, that is, polycubes of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 cubes. There are many similar variations of this type of puzzle, including the Soma cube and the Slothouber–Graatsma puzzle, two other dissections of a 3 × 3 × 3 cube into polycubes which use
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