How many moves does it take to solve a Rubik's Cube?

Zero you moron.  They come solved when you buy them.

Here's a worthless news item that has been annoying me for a while now and I need to get if off my chest.  It seems that some math consumed freak of nature has reduced the number of moves to solve the Rubik's cube to just 25 moves.  While I'm sure that is overwhelmingly impressive to people that watch Star Trek reruns late at night and still live in their mommy's basement; I protest this bullshit.

Here's the thing.  He didn't really prove it.  In fact this computer aided super geek didn't prove anything other than his ability to waste an ass load of time on a worthless project.  Here is an excerpt from a story on this crap.

Last year, a couple of fellas at Northeastern University with a bit of spare time on their hands proved that any configuration of a Rubik’s cube could be solved in a maximum of 26 moves.

Now Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has gone one better. He’s shown that there are no configurations that can be solved in 26 moves, thereby lowering the limit to 25.

Rokicki’s proof is a neat piece of computer science. He’s used the symmetry of the cube to study transformations of the cube in sets, rather than as individual moves. This allows him to separate the “cube space” into 2 billion sets each containing 20 billion elements. He then shows that a large number of these sets are essentially equivalent to other sets and so can be ignored.

Even then, to crunch through the remaining sets, he needed a workstation with 8GB of memory and around 1500 hours of time on a Q6600 CPU running at 1.6GHz.

But Rokicki isn’t finished there. He is already number-crunching his way to a new bound of 24 moves, a task he thinks will take several CPU months. And presumably after that, 23 beckons.

Where is this likely to finish? A number of configurations are known that can be solved in 20 moves but it’s also known that there are no configurations that can be solved in 21 moves.

So 20 looks like a good number to aim at although that will still be an upper limit. No news yet on whether 20 might also be the lower limit, which would give the answer a satisfying symmetry.

What this problem is crying out for is a kindly set theorist who can prove exactly what the upper and lower limits should be without recourse to a few years of CPU time (although it may take a few years of brain time). Any takers?

Let's take a look...  First off, these assholes haven't proved anything other than they are great at wasting time, money and environmental resources.  That alone deserves poke right in the fucking eye with a fresh number 2 pencil.  1500 hours of CPU time eh?  That's around 2 months... no wasting electricity there.  Dickhead.  But back up a bit.  It says he proved it could NOT be solved in 26, thus lowering the limit to 25.  What?  By default?  Sounds like bullshit to me as so eloquently stated by a poster in a comment to the article, "my cat's breath smells like cat food". 

How about actually solving one?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FXJP-ezaAg