Rubik's Cube solved

Speedcubers take note: any Rubik's Cube configuration, no matter how well or poorly mixed, can be taken down in 26 moves or fewer.

Kunkle and Cooperman used a supercomputer to figure this out, but their effort also required some clever maths. This is because there are a mind-numbing 43 quintillion (43,000,000,000,000,000,000) possible configurations for a cube - too many for even the most powerful machine to analyse one after the other.

So the pair simplified the problem in several ways.

Click through to find out how. But wait, there's more:

This isn't the end of the matter, though. Most mathematicians think it really only takes 20 moves to solve any Rubik's cube - it's just a question of proving this to be true.

You have your mission, Forrest.