DailyDirt: How Quickly Can You Solve A Rubik's Cube?

The original Rubik's cube puzzle was invented in 1974, but there were similar puzzles made before -- such as a 2x2x2 cube puzzle and a spherical 3x3x3 puzzle. The patents for these toys have expired, but people playing with these puzzles are still going strong. Speedcubing or speedsolving is a competitive sport, and there are variations on the activity to solve it blindfolded or with feet only or with just one hand. If you have a scrambled Rubik's cube sitting in drawer somewhere, maybe you'll be able to buy a robot to solve it for you soon.

• The fastest machine for solving a Rubik's cube can currently do it in less than 2 seconds. This bot beats the previous non-human Rubik's cube-solve bot (aka The Cubestormer 3) which holds a Guinness World Record of just 3.253 seconds, and it has solved a scrambled Rubik's cube in less than 1 second. [url]
• Speedcubers (that's apparently what you call people who solve Rubik's cubes in seconds) are getting slightly faster at solving this puzzle and have broken the 5 second barrier. Lucas Etter, a 14yo, solved a cube in 4.904 seconds. Clearly, there must be a physical limit to how fast a cube can be solved. How fast can anyone or anything rotate a face of a Rubik's cube? Multiply that time by 20 (though maybe there's a way to rotate multiple faces simultaneously) or so. [url]
• There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible Rubik's cube positions. The minimum number of turns required to solve a cube from an arbitrary starting position is known as "God's number" by some folks, and it was established to be 20 turns in 2010. [url]

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