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The Soma cube is a Solid Dissection Puzzle invented by Piet Hein during a lecture on Quantum Mechanics by Werner Heisenberg . Seven pieces made out of unit cubes must be assembled into a 3x3x3 cube. The pieces can also be used to make a variety of other interesting 3D shapes. The pieces of the Soma cube consist of all possible non-regular (i.e. excluding rectangles) combinations of four or less unit cubes. Note the lack of a 2x2x1 square and a 4x1x1 line, and addition of a right-angle piece of only three blocks. Of course, if the puzzle actually consisted of only, and all, possible four-block pieces, then it wouldn't be solvable. The soma cube is often regarded as the 3D equivalent of Polyominos . There are interesting Parity properties relating to solutions of the Soma puzzle. It is unclear whether the puzzle is named after the fictitious drug '' Soma '' in Aldous Huxley 's novel '' Brave New World ''. Soma has been discussed in detail by Martin Gardner and John Horton Conway , and the book '' Backtracking search computer program similar to that used for the Eight Queens Puzzle . The seven soma pieces are all Polycube s of order three or four:
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