{{Short description|Three-dimensional packing puzzle}} thumb|left|A disassembled diabolical cube and many assembled ones. thumb|A solution for the Diabolical Cube puzzle – swapping the 2-cube (red) and 4-cube (yellow) blocks gives another The '''diabolical cube''' is a three-dimensional dissection puzzle consisting of six polycubes (shapes formed by gluing cubes together face to face) that can be assembled together to form a single 3 × 3 × 3 cube.<ref>{{mathworld | title = Diabolical Cube | urlname = DiabolicalCube }}</ref><ref name="coffin">{{citation | last = Coffin | first = Stewart T. | contribution = Cubic Block Puzzles: The 3 x 3 x 3 Cube | publisher = Oxford University Press | title = The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections | url = http://www.johnrausch.com/PuzzlingWorld/chap03a.htm | year = 1991 | access-date = 2006-08-25 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20061031104100/http://www.johnrausch.com/PuzzlingWorld/chap03a.htm | archive-date = 2006-10-31 | url-status = dead }}.</ref> 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 and the Slothouber–Graatsma puzzle, two other dissections of a 3 × 3 × 3 cube into polycubes which use seven and nine pieces respectively. However, {{harvtxt|Coffin|1991}} 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 (Angelo Lewis).<ref name="coffin"/>
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.<ref name="coffin"/>{{Clear|left}}
== References == {{reflist}}
Category:Tiling puzzles Category:Mechanical puzzle cubes
{{puzzle-game-stub}}