this actually seems like a pretty neat of tech. in terms of how the joints and connections work under rotation like that. silly, yes, but if someone just randomly airmailed one to me i'd happily play around with it and admire it. they might even be able to sell a few of them since Rubik's Cubes seem to have a pretty persistently decent audience. what i want is something like this for chess: if you are playing vs. the "ai", it will move the pieces on the board like it's a player (well, more like in Harry Potter), and you can undo moves or hop into old or historical games and it will just slide the pieces around to make it work. i think i kinda have a scheme worked out, but it's very optimistic compared to my knowledge of the domain of making something like that work.