A LEGO Brickumentary Page #4

to take the car down.

The big joke at LEGO

conventions is the 1x5.

And uh, for those of you that

don't know what a 1x5 is...

That is a guy code in the LEGO community

for a hot girl.

And, it's because LEGO

doesn't make a 1x5.

Years ago, hot girls at conventions

were a rarity.

But, you know, luckily I have my 1x5,

so I'm all good.

My definition of adults that play

with LEGOs are just tall kids.

I like to build,

but I'm not the best builder.

Do you wanna know

who the best builder is?

My mom.

I'm finishing up just the last few

of the birch trees

here behind the library.

And, uh,

it's in the middle of Rivendell.

And we're really excited

about finishing it,

but we're also a little bit surprised

at how big it turned out to be.

You never quite know when you're

working on one section at a time,

until you put it all together.

I just started building again

a couple years ago

when my son was getting

interested in building.

Let's make it only two segments long.

Why?

Because we don't want it to be too wide,

'cause it's up next to rocks.

I went from doing laundry one day

to having over two and a half

million hits on my Flickr pages.

And it was pretty overwhelming.

For two years in a row

Alice's work has received

the coveted People's Choice Award

from convention goers.

This year she's built

an enormous model of Rivendell,

the mythic city from

The Lord of the Rings.

I think people are going to like it.

I don't think that there's

anything quite like it.

One of my favorite things

to do in a convention is

to encourage the girls to build.

LEGO has historically

really been focused on boys.

And they have admitted they have only

been addressing half the population.

They're now taking it seriously.

I think there's a tremendous world

of possibilities

that has been untapped so far.

There are lots of girls

who come up and say,

"Thank you for being a role model."

Raise the drawbridge!

Load the "cattle-pults"!

Release the hounds!

Oh! Hi, guys.

As you can see, people build

all sorts of things out of LEGO bricks.

The combinations people come up with,

it's almost infinite.

Wait a minute,

I wonder if it is infinite. Hey!

There's a guy in Denmark

trying to figure that out.

I'm going to talk about

things that we know about

the growth of the number

of LEGO configurations.

My name is Soren Eilers.

I'm a professor of mathematics.

It all started in LEGOLAND, actually.

It was one of those rainy days

in Danish summer,

and I was there with my daughter.

Soren saw a display dedicated

to the original patent

filed by Ole's son, Godtfred.

Godtfred was asked

by the patent officer,

"ow many ways can you put

together six of these bricks?"

And he says, something like,

"We're still working on it,

but when I left home,

we had 102,981,000,"

or something like that.

And so I was wondering

how they computed that number

because it seemed to be

a difficult mathematical problem.

What LEGO had done

was to just count the... the towers

where you put the things

on top of each other.

Whereas if I have a building

that is sort of low and wide,

I have a lot of options

for the final one.

Of course I tried to attack

this with theory,

but I didn't get anywhere.

So, essentially, all that I could think

of doing was ask a computer.

In fact my program was very inefficient.

Took me a week to compute this number.

The correct number

is quite a lot higher.

The correct number is 915,103,765.

But once Soren had the number,

the obvious question was,

what happens if you add a seventh brick?

Or an eighth?

So it's pretty easy to count

all the way to five.

Six, I can now recompute this number

maybe in five minutes or so.

And then each time it takes

about a hundred times more.

So, next time it's a couple of hours.

Counting eight it took me

something like 500 hours.

So if I was to count with nine or ten...

This would probably take years,

maybe hundreds of years.

So what does this unsolvable problem

say about the LEGO system?

By mathematical definition,

this is a finite system.

We have a finite number of bricks.

They have a finite number

of studs and holes.

But for all practical human purposes,

these bricks are infinitely flexible,

and not only that, they define

a mathematical problem

of infinite complexity.

So I would say that,

"Yes, it is finite,

but in a way it's also infinite."

I think this is the beginning

of what we call systematic creativity.

This basic system of tubes and studs

that locks together,

and it will take a child's idea

or an adult's idea,

and it'll hold it together.

It'll give it form and give them

a new medium of communication.

The interesting thing with

the LEGO brick, as we see here,

is that the instructions

for how it fits with the rest

is actually embedded.

We don't need an instruction.

We don't need a dictionary or grammar.

It's embedded in the system.

It became this platform

where people all over the world

had a shared language,

it's like the letters or notes in music.

It's a creative tool,

it's a creative medium,

but it's also a language.

It's a language that's more global

than English and Windows.

So with such a limitless product,

how did the LEGO company experience

anything but constant success?

Believe it or not, not that long ago,

the company was in pretty dire straits.

On the CBS Worldwide Market Watch,

the Danish toymaker LEGO

today reported

its first ever annual loss.

If the kids love it, why then is

the Danish company in so much trouble?

What happened to LEGO is LEGO

had an unprecedented growth rate

when it really got

the bricks right in '78,

until the mid-1990s.

It was growing fast, everything was good,

and it suddenly collapsed.

Sales of two of their

three big products fall off a cliff.

And they almost went out of

business in 2003.

Ten years ago, our company

was in serious trouble,

and the wonderful thing about it,

we couldn't blame anybody else.

They had lost sight

of their most important asset:

the genius of the LEGO system.

Smart people from around the world

had told LEGO in the '90s

that this brick is gonna

become irrelevant.

You need to find new things.

It was seen as...

Actually, this was seen as uncool.

They were making more and more

custom pieces for specific sets.

At one point, they had

over 14,000 unique elements.

Some of the sets had only a few elements

and required almost no construction.

When we made products

which were quicker to build,

those who didn't like to build

still said, "I don't like to build it.

I'd rather buy a die-cast car

or doll or something else."

And those who actually did

like LEGO for what it is,

they said, "What is this now?"

And because we didn't understand that

and also because

we were actually, frankly,

quite arrogant as a company

towards our customers,

we were making the wrong products,

and we were not even

able to deliver the products

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