Rubik's Cube World Record SMASHED. Kid goes sub 3 seconds!

Adam Spencer
18 minutes ago
3 min read

9 year old Polish wunderkind Teodor Zajder has smashed the Rubik's cube world record, solving a scrambled cube in … get this … just 2.766 seconds. Yes that's not a misprint. The 3 second barrier has been shattered.

Diary of a cube-geek.

It might not surprise you to know that in my teenage years I loved solving Rubik's cubes. I can still remember the thrill of solving a cube on the North-Western bus line from Gladesville to Chatswood one wintry school morning … in 41 seconds.

But my PB is complete amateur hour compared to the army of serious cubers, worldwide, most teens or preteens who regularly break 10 seconds.

Anything sub 5 seconds is considered Olympic-level elite.

And the T-dog has just gone faster than any human before.

Let's break it down.

It was a'comin.

The cubing community had been abuzz since April last year when 7 year-old Chinese prodigy Xuanyi Geng posted a then world record of 3.05 seconds. It seemed only a matter of time before someone went under 3 seconds.

But most people assumed it would be Geng or rival Cao Qixian, the fastest female cuber of all time, who would break the mythical 3 second barrier.

No one told the Zajder Raider.

Feliks Zemdegs, Australian cubing legend, multiple world record holder and OG godfather of the sport said exclusively to #NerdNews

"It was a lucky scramble but he still had to execute on it and he did so amazingly!"

How do they do it.

Competitive cubing is serious. After cubes are scrambled via official software, competitors get 15 seconds inspection time. Hands on timing panels, green light flashes, and we're off.

In the next few seconds most outsiders like us just perceive a flurry of fingers, a chaos of colours. But the cuber is executing specific moves to get the cube closer to solution.

There are various solving formula or algorithms that cubers might use. Most world class cubers specialise in one. The CFOP method for example has 4 stages; arrange the 4 edges of one face, complete the two layers below that face, get the last face all the one colour, arrange the pieces on that final face correctly.

To master CFOP cubers must memorise 119 subroutines and decide, at speed, which of these to deploy. The ability to see ahead before you complete one step and know which subroutine to move to next is where the crucial tenths of seconds come from that separate legends from mere supernerds.

God's Number.

There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ways to arrange a Rubik's cube.

Cute fact - this would cover the entire Earth to a depth of 275 cubes (or 16 metres deep!)

But each of these cubes must have a fastest solution. In July 2010 a team of computer scientists ended decades of debate and confirmed that any cube could be solved in just 20 moves.

Given that God would solve every cube perfectly, 20 is known among math's nerds as God's Number.

It's impossible for a professional cuber to remember all 43 quintillion of these solutions. Most speed cubers take 50 or so moves to execute a solve.

Teodor's solve this week at the GLS Big Cubes event in Gdańsk was executed in a blistering 29 moves.