Skewb Diamond facts for kids
The Skewb Diamond is a cool puzzle that looks like a diamond or two pyramids joined at their bases. It's shaped like an octahedron, which is a 3D shape with eight flat faces. Just like the famous Rubik's Cube, your goal is to mix up its colors and then solve it! This puzzle has 14 parts that can move around. There are 138,240 different ways its pieces can be arranged. A clever German puzzle inventor named Uwe Meffert created it.
Contents
What is the Skewb Diamond?
The Skewb Diamond has 6 corner pieces that look like small octahedrons. It also has 8 triangular pieces in the middle of each face. All these pieces can move and twist around each other.
This puzzle is called a deep-cut puzzle. This means that when you turn a side, the cut goes right through the middle of the puzzle. It's like slicing an apple exactly in half.
How is it like the Skewb puzzle?
The Skewb Diamond is very similar to another puzzle called the Skewb. They share the same number of pieces and work in a similar way.
However, there's a cool difference:
- On the Skewb, the triangular pieces at the corners don't really show which way they are turned.
- On the Skewb Diamond, the square pieces in the center do show their direction.
Think of it this way: the corner pieces on the Skewb are like the center pieces on the Skewb Diamond.
How many ways can you scramble a Skewb Diamond?
The main idea of the Skewb Diamond is to mix up its colors. Then, you try to put it back to its original solved state. This means all the colors on each face match up again.
The puzzle has 6 corner pieces and 8 face center pieces.
- The way the 8 face centers can be arranged depends on each other. There are only 4!/2 ways for them to be in different spots. Each face center only has one way it can be turned.
- For the 6 corner pieces, there are 6!/2 ways they can be arranged. Each corner can be turned in two ways. However, the way the last corner is turned depends on the other 5. This means there are 25 possible ways for the corners to be oriented.
When you multiply all these possibilities together, you get the total number of ways the Skewb Diamond can be scrambled: 138,240 combinations!
See also
In Spanish: Skewb diamante para niños
