Bedlam cube
solid dissection puzzle
The Bedlam cube is a solid dissection puzzle invented by British puzzle expert Bruce Bedlam.
Design
The puzzle consists of thirteen polycubic pieces: twelve pentacubes and one tetracube. The objective is to assemble these pieces into a 4 x 4 x 4 cube. There are 19,186 distinct ways of doing so, up to rotations and reflections.
The Bedlam cube is one unit per side larger than the 3 x 3 x 3 Soma cube, and is much more difficult to solve.
History
Two of the BBC's 'Dragons' from Dragons' Den, Rachel Elnaugh and Theo Paphitis, were to invest in the Bedlam cube during the 2005 series. They offered £100,000 for a 30% share of equity in Bedlam Puzzles. Danny Bamping (the entrepreneur behind Bedlam cube) finally chose a bank loan instead of their investment, as seen in the relevant "Where Are They Now" episode of Dragons' Den.
Records
According to Guinness World Records, the uncontested world record for assembling the Bedlam Cube is 11.03 seconds by Danny Bamping on 9 November 2006. The blindfolded record is 27.21 seconds by Aleksandr Iljasov on 25 February 2008.
The public source identifies “Bedlam cube” as solid dissection puzzle. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bedlam, cube and solid.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bedlam cube” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.