The diabolical cube is a three-dimensional

dissection puzzle A dissection puzzle, also called a transformation puzzle or ''Richter Puzzle'', is a tiling puzzle where a set of pieces can be assembled in different ways to produce two or more distinct geometric shapes. The creation of new dissection puzzles ...

consisting of six

polycube upAll 8 one-sided tetracubes – if chirality is ignored, the bottom 2 in grey are considered the same, giving 7 free tetracubes in total A puzzle involving arranging nine L tricubes into a 3×3 cube A polycube is a solid figure formed by j ...

s (shapes formed by gluing

cube In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. Viewed from a corner it is a hexagon and its net is usually depicted as a cross. The cube is the only r ...

s together face to face) that can be assembled together to form a single 3 × 3 × 3 cube.. The six pieces are: one dicube, one tricube, one tetracube, one pentacube, one hexacube and one heptacube, that is, polycubes of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 cubes. There are many similar variations of this type of puzzle, including the

Soma cube The Soma cube is a solid dissection puzzle invented by Danish polymath Piet Hein in 1933 during a lecture on quantum mechanics conducted by Werner Heisenberg. Seven pieces made out of unit cubes must be assembled into a 3×3×3 cube. The pie ...

and the

Slothouber–Graatsma puzzle The Slothouber–Graatsma puzzle is a packing problem that calls for packing six 1 × 2 × 2 blocks and three 1 × 1 × 1 blocks into a 3 × 3 × 3 box. The solution to this puzzle is unique ( up to mirror reflections and rotations). It was named ...

, two other

dissections Dissection (from Latin ' "to cut to pieces"; also called anatomization) is the dismembering of the body of a deceased animal or plant to study its anatomical structure. Autopsy is used in pathology and forensic medicine to determine the cause of ...

of a 3 × 3 × 3 cube into polycubes which use seven and nine pieces respectively. However, writes that the diabolical cube appears to be the oldest puzzle of this type, first appearing in an 1893 book ''Puzzles Old and New'' by

Professor Hoffmann Professor Hoffmann (1839–1919) was the pseudonym of Angelo John Lewis, an English-born barrister and writer who has been described as "the most prolific and influential magic author and translator until modern times."

(Angelo Lewis). Because all of the pieces have only a single layer of cubes, their shape is unchanged by a mirror reflection, so a mirror reflection of a solution produces either the same solution or another valid solution. The puzzle has 13 different solutions, if mirrored pairs of solutions are not counted as being distinct from each other.

References

Tiling puzzles Mechanical puzzle cubes {{puzzle-game-stub