Rubik's Snake

By being twisted, the Rubik's Snake can be made to resemble a wide variety of objects, animals, or geometric shapes.

[2] According to Ernő Rubik: "The snake is not a problem to be solved; it offers infinite possibilities of combination.

Rather than numbers, Albert Fiore uses letters to refer to the direction the second (rightward) section is turned in relation to the first (leftward) section: D, L, U, and R.[4] These are listed consecutively rather than numbered, so that a completely straight figure rather than being presumed as a starting point is notated DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD.

The real number of different shapes is lower, since some configurations are spatially impossible (because they would require multiple prisms to occupy the same region of space).

Peter Aylett computed by an exhaustive search that 13446591920995 (≈ 1.3×1013 or 13 trillion) positions are possible when prohibiting prism collisions, or passing through a collision to reach another position; or 6721828475867 (≈ 6.7×1012) when mirror images (defined as the same sequence of turns, but from the other end of the snake) are counted as the one position, and likewise for rotational symmetries in loops (where the sequence of turns in a loop is cycled).

[6] The world record for the "Fastest time to Solve a Snake Rubik's Cube" (into a ball) was set by Lim Kai Yi on 7 January 2024.