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
Soma cube performance and effort in a series of psychology experiments. In these experiments, test subjects are asked to solve a soma cube as many times as possible within a set period of time. For example, In 1969, Edward Deci, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate assistant at the time, asked his research subjects to solve a soma cube under conditions with varying incentives in his dissertation work on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation establishing the social psychological theory of crowding out. In each of the 240 solutions to the cube puzzle, there is only one place that the "T" piece can be placed.