Glenn Culler -- Puzzle Solver

David Menkin

In the fall of 1978, I went to Glenn's house to keep him company while he was recovering from an illness. Before going I decided to ask him to help me figure out how to solve the problem of straightening out RUBIK'S cube. This was well before it had become popular in the United States. On a family trip to England our son had found a Rubik's cube and brought it home, knowing how much I enjoyed playing with puzzles like that. After many hours, I was able to get all but two of the squares in their proper places, but no matter what I tried, I could not properly orient those last two pieces. So I thought it might help Glenn to have something to occupy his time while he was house bound during his recovery.

We had a nice visit, talked about many subjects, and then I showed him my RUBIK'S cube and asked him if he could figure out how to properly orient those last two pieces. He placed with it for a while but had no luck in solving the problem. When I left him, I let him keep the cube to play with.

Not too many days later, I received a telephone call from Glenn and he sounded so happy. He had developed a method to properly orient every piece of the cube no matter how it was mixed up. I quickly went over to find out how he had done it. When I arrived GLENN proudly showed me a stack of papers, 18 pages thick, filled with diagrams, charts, and arrays of tables that I could not understand. GLENN then went on to explain to me what he had done, but not being a skilled mathematical genius, I had trouble comprehending his mathematical analysis. I finally got the idea that he had mathematically modeled the cube, and solved the problem on paper.

It was several years later that Rubik's cube became popular in this country, and in March of 1981, Scientific American Magazine had a front page picture of Rubik's cube and a story of how somebody had figured out how to reorient a mixed up cube, but he had to use a computer with an artificial intelligence program to solve the problem. Glenn had done it on paper in a fraction of the time that so called genius had taken with his computer. Glenn, obviously, was way ahead of anyone else, but never got the public recognition since he did it before most people even knew there was such a thing as Rubik's cube. From other stories you will read about Glenn, this sort of accomplishment was very common for him. It did not seem to matter to him whether he was presented with a puzzle or a complex computer problem, he always loved the challenge of working out a solution to the problem.

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