BBC News writes of a supercomputer proof that a Rubik’s cube can always be solved in no more than 26 moves, based on some work from a couple of Northeastern University graduate students.

The study brings scientists one step closer to finding the so-called “God’s Number” which is the minimum number of moves needed to solve any disordered Rubik’s cube.

It is so named because God would only need the smallest number of moves to solve a cube. Theoretical work suggests that God’s Number is in the “low 20s”.

This is another interesting example of hard proofs that have only been solved with the help of exhaustive search and supercomputers (despite the mappings between the cube and group theory.)