Cracking The Cube

"Rubik's Cube has approximately 43 quintillion possible configurations. Kunkle, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, has proved that 26 moves are enough to solve any Rubik's Cube, no matter how scrambled. That's one move below the previous record. In the process of cracking the cube, he developed algorithms that can be useful for problems as disparate as scheduling air flights and determining how proteins will fold."

http://blog.sciencenews.org/mathtrek/2007/08/cracking_the_cube.html