It's not you – solving a Rubik's cube quickly is officially hard

If you thought solving a Rubik's cube was difficult, you were right and maths can back you up. A recent study shows that the question of whether a scrambled Rubik's cube of any size can be solved in a given number of moves is what's called NP-complete – that's maths lingo for a problem even mathematicians find hard to solve. To prove that the problem is NP-complete, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Erik Demaine, Sarah Eisenstat, and Mikhail Rudoy showed that figuring out how to solve a Rubik's cube with any number of squares on a side in the smallest number of moves will also give you a solution to another problem known to be NP-complete: the Hamiltonian path problem. That question asks whether there is route that visits each vertex exactly once in a given graph consisting of a collection of vertices connected by edges, like a triangle, pentagram, or the vast connections in a social network such as Facebook. It's reminiscent of the travelling salesperson problem, which aims to find the shortest route that visits several cities only once, probably the most famous NP-complete question of all.