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New Rubik’s Cube record: 0.38 seconds

March 7, 2018.

The Rubik’s contraption.

The Rubik’s contraption. © Ben Katz.

Two hardware hackers have created a robot that has broken the records for fastest solving of a Rubik’s cube — in 0.38 seconds, which is 40 percent faster than the previous record of 0.637 seconds. In contrast to a human player, who would use a looser cube, the robot works best when the cube was tightened way beyond what is intuitive. The creators used a pair of Playstation 3 Eye webcams to observe the faces of the cube, but they had trouble distinguishing the red and orange faces. So they painted them black for the cameras to recognize properly. The custom-built motor controller takes only 10 milliseconds to perform a single turn of the Rubik’s Cube. At speeds like that, if I had to bet, my money would be on the robot…

Ars Technica, “Robot smashes Rubik’s Cube record with 0.38-second solve.”

⇨ Ben Katz, “The Rubik’s Contraption.”