MargenA Rubik's Cube has exactly 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations: 43 quintillion. If you turned it to a new position every second, you'd need one thousand four hundred times the age of the universe to see them all.
And yet, from any of those positions, however tangled it looks, the cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer.
Mathematicians call that figure «God's number»: the number of steps a perfect, all-knowing solver would need. Proving it took 35 years of theory and, finally, in 2010, a donation of computing time from Google: the computers reviewed, by families of symmetry, every possible position.
Inside the most famous chaos in the world, order is never more than twenty steps away. There's something almost consoling in that.
Source: cube20.org