Rubik’s Cube was invented by Ernő Rubik and it was invented in 1974 and commercialized in 1980, and for many years it was a best-selling toy. Rubik was a sculptor by trade. Rubik’s Cube itself is a simple looking 3-D combination puzzle: each of the six faces is covered by nine stickers, each of one of six solid colors. The colors are white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow. Once the colors have become randomly moved around, solving the puzzle is challenging: there are 239,500,800 arrangements.
The puzzle has challenged many. In November 2015 the world record for solving the puzzle was set by a boy aged 14 called Lucas Etter. The puzzle was solved in 4.9 seconds, beating the previous record of 5.3 seconds by a whisker.
If 4.9 seconds is amazing. How about 1.2 seconds? This is the speed achieved by a robot, according to Laboratory Roots. The robot was especially built to solve the puzzle quickly. The robot was constructed via 3D printing, to create calibrated cube-gripping tips. The robot is programmed with predetermined algorithms in order to solve the various cube combinations. For the robot to solve the puzzle, holes needed to be drilled into the sides of the cube.
The video below shows the record breaking feat. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss it:
The robot, called CubeStormer 3, was built by inventors Jay Flatland and Paul Rose. The inventors are in the process of applying for the official world record.
