Is the Rubik's Cube an IQ Test?
The Rubik's Cube is not an official IQ test, yet it can serve as a measure of certain cognitive skills. Solving a Rubik's Cube involves spatial reasoning, problem-solving, and logical thinking, all of which are components of intelligence. However, intelligence is multi-faceted, and an IQ test typically assesses a broader range of cognitive abilities, including verbal skills, mathematical reasoning, and memory.
While proficiency in solving a Rubik's Cube may indicate strong analytical skills or pattern recognition, it does not provide a comprehensive assessment of a person's overall intelligence. The Rubik's Cube reflects some cognitive abilities, yet it should not be regarded as a definitive measure of IQ.
Do We Believer the Rubik's Cube Correlates with Intelligence?
No. The Rubik's cube is not a measure of intelligence. Perhaps solving it on your own with no help at all could indicate an intelligence above the average, but beyond that, there is no correlation. If you learn to solve the Rubik's cube in a few weeks, you could confidently state that you are at least not too far below average, but there is no correlation beyond that.
At the low level, it is merely by-heart knowledge of the same old algorithms that one has read from the manual. However, at the high level, the ability to quickly visualize the spatial position of each color is likely correlated with IQ. For the most part, it is obsessive practice over intelligence.
From Rubik's Cube to Problem-Solving
The Rubik's Cube is likely not sufficiently general to be a full test of intelligence just as an IQ test is not general enough to be a full intelligence test. However, it is certainly a test of at least one extremely important type of intelligence. During the original craze, one person in a typical high school with a thousand people in it would have solved the cube. Two did in my school: one of the oldest and one of the youngest.
I reckon that fifty percent of people could potentially have solved it if they'd just kept working at it for long enough. Most lacked the patience, so when books came out teaching ways of solving it, they all gave up and cheated. I was shocked by their lack of ambition. A lot of it came down to my determination and self-belief, however. I happened to have an older cousin and a mathematician uncle who had already solved it, so I was determined not to be outdone: I had no choice but to solve it. Other relatives solved it later too, perhaps with a genetic or cultural advantage or both, but it's possible that it was just this in-family competition that drove us to succeed.
The kind of intelligence needed to solve a Rubik's Cube and, indeed, to solve a host of other hard problems, is the kind needed to solve problems in general. These problems are hard to find a way to solve, but once you've found the right way to approach them, the solution typically falls into place quickly. You don't have an existing algorithm to apply that will solve the puzzle directly, so you have to find something new to add to your toolkit. Finding it can involve staring into a void for weeks or months, trying to find something that a normal person would quickly decide can't be there. I kept on looking and found something. I learned from that and I’ve solved a thousand similarly hard puzzles in linguistics and semantics by following the same approach: I simply don’t give up and I search for all possible routes both inside and outside the box until I find a way through. It takes hard work and patience, but you also have to run a good algorithm for searching for hidden routes to follow so that you can find what everyone else will likely miss: that’s the thinking outside the box business.
The algorithm is the main thing that enables high intelligence in the form of problem-solving skills and it's far more important than IQ.