August 11, 2010 | Sonja

It’s one of the world’s most popular puzzles with over 400 million sold, and now researchers claim that any scrambled start point on a Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer.

There are over 43 billion billion possible starting positons on the puzzle. To work out the minimum number of moves to solve any of these would take a normal computer over 200 years. But luckily for the research team at Kent State University, Google offered to run the calculation for them on its computer network.

So there you have it, every configuration can be solved in 20 moves or fewer – no excuses now, get unscrambling!