Chapter 30 The Soma Cube

Chapter 30 is about the Soma cube. The Soma cube was invented by Piet Hein who was a Danish writer. He came up with the idea of the Soma cube when he was listening to a lecture given by a physicist, Werner Heisenberg. Piet Hein realized that it is possible to form irregular shapes by combining four cubes of the same size and shape and put together to make a bigger cube. The way that an irregular shape is described is that it has concavity and is usually three cubes joined together. He states that two cubes are able to be joined together, but only on a single coordinate. On the other hand, three cubes can have a second coordinate perpendicular to the first coordinate, and so on with four cubes. As Hein continued to discover new things about the cubes, he realized that twenty seven little cubes would be able to make three by three by three cubes. Ever since he tried making these seven components of cubes, he was able to confirm his research and it became known as the Soma.

            The Soma puzzle started getting very popular among people. It was easy to make but involved a lot of thinking. In order to make a Soma cube, you should start by trying to make a stepped structure. There are more than 230 different solutions for the Soma cube constructions. One of the strategies given was to first put your irregular shapes down first and then fill the structures in. As the cube was becoming a popular item among other people, they kept trying to solve all of the Soma problems. They solved so many that the shapes started becoming familiar to them and they were able to do it in their heads. A few tests were done by psychologists that showed that solving these puzzles was correlated with a person’s general intelligence. There is an example that as the ratios of the cubes change, it is more possible to build them.

            Many of the readers about the Soma were so fascinated that they sent in their own sketches of their puzzles and complaints that they are now devoting their time to solving these Soma cube puzzles in their free time. Somas became part of the everyday life for teachers to give to students and psychological tests. Some cool examples included building stairs with cubes, a dog, a chair, a sofa, a scorpion, a bathtub, and many more. A Soma set consists of seven pieces normally; however, one man named Theodore Katsanis sent in a letter suggesting of a set of eight pieces formed with four cubes which form two by four by four rectangular shapes. He said that a person can make five cubes by putting together the twenty nine pieces and he called this a “pentacube”. The Soma pieces are a subset of polycubes which are polyhedrons that join unit cubes together by faces. It is also verified that there are 240 ways of making the Soma cube. A Rhoma is a slant version of the Soma made by a distortion of the large cube into a rhomboid shape. An example of a 27 cubed dissection would be that the cubes are either black or white and you have to make a cube that is checkered throughout the entire structure or just on its six faces. The cubes can also be made into different colors and you would have to form a cube with a specific pattern of the different colors on each face.

            I thought that this chapter was really interesting. There were many intriguing examples in the book with pictures of the different Soma cubes. It got me to think about different types of the cubes and shapes that the book gave. The chapter stated that out of the figures given in the book, one of them was not able to be made out of the Soma pieces. I thought that was very interesting because the picture showed that it was built so it was hard to tell, but at the end of the chapter when it told me that it was the skyscraper that couldn’t be made out of the Soma pieces, I looked over that figure and noticed that there are never two cubes exactly next to each other. It surprised me that I wasn’t able to figure out which one couldn’t be built just from looking at the picture, but the chapter did state that it takes many days for people to usually figure it out. I also enjoyed looking at the different shapes that were shown inside of the chapter.