A solid dissection puzzle invented by Piet Hein during a lecture on Quantum Mechanics by Werner Heisenberg. There are seven soma pieces composed of all the irregular face-joined cubes (polycubes) with <=4 cubes. The object is to assemble the pieces into a cube. There are 240 essentially distinct ways of doing so (Beeler 1972, Berlekamp et al. 1982), as first enumerated one rainy afternoon in 1961 by J. H. Conway and Mike Guy. A commercial version of the cube colors the pieces black, green, orange, white, red, and blue. When the 48 symmetries of the cube, three ways of assembling the black piece, and 2^5 ways of assembling the green, orange, white, red, and blue pieces are counted, the total number of solutions rises to 1105920.

cube dissection | polycube | SOMA