Engineering Students Shatter Rubik’s Cube Solving Record with 103 Milliseconds
Records are made to be broken, and the latest record-breaking time for solving a Rubik’s Cube by a robot stands at a mind-boggling 103 milliseconds. Full credit goes to a team of undergraduate engineering students from Purdue University in the US: Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay, and Alex Berta. Their achievement is now officially listed on the Guinness World Records site.
The new record time surpasses the previous record of 305 milliseconds set by a team at Mitsubishi. It’s incredible to think that just nine years ago, the record time dropped below a second for the first time.
The super-speedy robot responsible for the feat has been named the Purdubik’s Cube. It incorporates a redesigned cube that won’t break apart during solving, a machine vision system to track colored blocks, and special algorithms developed by the students for efficient block rotation.
The team has optimized the cube’s movements for sub-millisecond control, setting new standards for high-speed object manipulation.
Nak-seung Patrick Hyun, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who mentored the students, commented, “This achievement isn’t just about breaking a record; it pushes the boundaries of what synthetic systems can do and brings us closer to understanding ultra-fast coordinated control systems like those found in nature.”
Since its debut at a student design competition in December, the Purdubik’s Cube has continued to impress, even allowing remote challenges via a Bluetooth link to scramble the cube for solving.
Comparing human abilities to the robot, the fastest human record for solving a Rubik’s Cube is 3.05 seconds, held by 7-year-old Xuanyi Geng from China. The Rubik’s Cube has a long history, inspiring many speed records over the years.
Matthew Patrohay shared his inspiration for the project, “Back in high school, I saw a video of MIT students solving the cube in 380 milliseconds. I thought, ‘that’s a really cool project. I’d love to try and beat it someday’. Now here I am at Purdue – proving we can go even faster.”
