By BINA VENKATARAMAN


“It was very visual. Usually when you develop an algorithm or a formula you cannot really see it.”


“It’s a little plastic toy,’’ said Jessica Fridrich, tossing a Rubik’s Cube between her long-fingered hands one afternoon in her office at Binghamton University in upstate New York.

But the little toy, an ‘80s icon, has made a big comeback. For a thriving subculture of people who try to solve the cube as fast as possible, Dr.Fridrich is a pioneer and a patron saint. She forged what remains arguably the world’s most common strategy for speed-solving the puzzle, and appeared in a documentary about the Rubik’s Cube released last fall.

Dr.Fridrich first cracked the colorful walls of the Rubik’s Cube in 1981 as a teenager living in a Czech coal mining city. Few people will spend decades decoding a plastic block, no matter how mathematically intricate. But few people are as tenacious as the architect of“The Fridrich Method,’’a roadmap that requires a speedcuber to memorize and unleash at least 53 algorithms, each of which is a series of turns of the cube’s rows and columns in a given sequence.

For Dr.Fridrich, tackling an impossible puzzle is not a hobby, and the Rubik’s Cube is not simply a game. They are obsessions.

Trapped in Czechoslovakia until the Velvet Revolution made migration to the United States for doctoral study possible, Dr.Fridrich sketched out a solution to the Rubik’s Cube even before owning one.

Dr.Fridrich, 44, an electrical engineering professor, is frequently confronted at academic conferences and asked to solve the cube on the spot. She has inspired scores of YouTube videos from cube enthusiasts riffing on her method, which was propagated on the Internet in the late 1990s as the puzzle saw a resurgence.

“She chose the basic route, the direction we would take up the mountain,’’said Dan Knights, winner of the 2003 World Rubik’s Cube Championship (Dr.Fridrich placed second).“And other people are finding different ways from one ledge to another.”

In her research in digital forensics, Dr.Fridrich uses computers to tackle another seemingly intractable puzzle: matching a photograph with the individual camera that took it. Law enforcement agencies plan to use the techniques to track down child pornographers and movie pirates.

“She looks at a problem that seems insolvable,”said George J.Klir, the retired professor who recruited her 18 years ago.“And she finds a way to solve it, again and again.”

Dr.Fridrich was drawn to“camera ballistics’’because of its inscrutable mysteries, similar to those the Rubik’s Cube held in the early ‘80s.“It was very visual,’’she said.“Usually when you develop an algorithm or a formula you cannot really see it.’’

When Dr.Fridrich forged her Rubik’s Cube algorithms, she did so using only pencil, paper and a cube. Today, the cube is no longer an uncharted territory like digital forensics, but a terrain well-plowed by personal computers and the sweaty palms of speedcubers.

Software programs can compute the quickest solution to any given mix-up of the cube’s faces. Now, Dr.Fridrich said, the cube has been“optimized to death,’’and holds little allure - even though she still keeps nearly 20 of the plastic puzzles scattered around her office and home.

Dr.Fridrich has been far surpassed by speedcubers with records of 14, 13 and 10 seconds, some of whom can solve the cube blindfolded after studying it for less than a minute.“Today I would probably be in 20th or 30th place,”she said.“I am letting it go because I think it’s time for others to succeed.’’

For someone who wins for the sake of winning, who never roots for the underdog, in sports or in life, this retreat from speedcubing seems something like a reluctant acceptance that some things are indeed, impossible.

At the very least, she admitted,“it’s not yet possible to do everything at once.’’