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
Prince Rupert's cube the hole through which a cube larger than the original one (up to side length formula_2) may pass. The parts of the unit cube that remain, after emptying this hole, form two triangular prisms and two irregular tetrahedra, connected by thin bridges at the four vertices of the square. Each prism has as its six vertices two adjacent vertices of the cube, and four points along the edges of the cube at distance 1/4 from these cube vertices. Each tetrahedron has as its four vertices one vertex of the cube, two points at distance 3/4 from it on two of