Did you know that the Rubik's Cube can be completed in 3.47 seconds?

Rubik has seen his colour-matching puzzle go from a classroom teaching tool in Cold War-era Hungary to a worldwide phenomenon with over 450 million cubes sold and a mini-empire of related toys. Photo: AP

If you’ve ever had trouble solving a Rubik’s Cube, a good piece of advice is to break it down into steps. It’s worth a shot: That advice is from the man who invented it.

“Problem solving is a very basic activity of the human mind and if a problem is complex you need to divide the problem into smaller elements,” says Erno Rubik, who invented the cube in 1974.