2026-09-25 · history
Instant Insanity (1967) — One Right Answer Among 41,472
In 1967, Parker Brothers released a toy that was nothing more than four cubes stacked in a row: Instant Insanity. The rule was simple — make all four colors appear on every side of the stack. Yet there are 41,472 possible arrangements, and essentially only one way satisfies the condition. Its ancestor was a patented 1900 puzzle called the "Katzenjammer," known by the 1940s as "The Great Tantalizer." In 1947, a group of Cambridge students writing under a pseudonym solved that ancestor puzzle by turning it into a graph — colors as vertices, opposite faces as edges. This article traces the toy's origins, and how the tradition of treating puzzles as objects of computational-complexity theory reaches, half a century later, all the way to research on the Steam game Portal.
