This is a ridiculously humungous number, of course, but… Recently, a Greek engineer Panagiotis Verdes figured out how to make 6×6 and 7×7 cubes. This is getting uncomfortably close to the number of atoms in the known universe. It would also weigh about 70 times as much as our galaxy, and instantly collapse into a black hole with an explosion that would wipe out the Milky way, the Magellanic clouds, and probably wake up some sleepy Andromedans as well. The sugar would fill the solar system out to about 3.5 times the orbit of Pluto. To understand how big this number is, imagine you had this many teaspoons of sugar (say you’re planning a really big tea party).

The 4x4x4 Rubik’s cube (called the Master Cube, or Rubik’s Revenge – not sure who he was avenging, I must say) has 7 401 196 841 564 901 869 874 093 974 498 574 336 000 000 000 combinations (that is, 7.4 quattuordecillion, if you really wanted to know). It’s a little less than the square of the earth’s population, for example. Again, as pointed out on this website’s main page, this is a manageably imaginable number. The original 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube has 43 252 003 274 489 856 000 combinations, or 43 quintillion. Mind you, four months to solve the 2×2 cube is somewhat slower than the world record. Assuming your cube – or your wrist – doesn’t break in the meantime. If you fiddle with the 2x2x2 cube randomly, eight hours a day continuously, you’ll solve it by pure chance roughly two or three times per year. The 2x2x2 Rubik’s cube (called the Pocket Cube) has 3674160 combinations. There’s also a javascript calculator in case you want to figure it out for larger sizes.

So, I made this page, listing the numbers of combinations for various sized cubes. 'How many combinations does the Rubik’s cube have? It’s easy to find out how many the 3x3x3 has, but when I looked, there were precious few pages that showed the number of combinations for all the sizes from 2x2x2 to 7x7x7.

Rubiks cube timer javascript