Records are there to be broken, but when it comes to the fastest time to solve a Rubik’s Cube by a robot, it’s difficult to see how much more progress can be made: the latest record-breaking time stands at a mind-boggling 103 milliseconds.
Full credit to the new world record holders, a team of undergraduate engineering students from Purdue University in the US: Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay, and Alex Berta. Their achievement is official and listed on the Guinness World Records site.
The new time is faster than the blink of an eye, and beats the previous record of 305 milliseconds set by a team at Mitsubishi. It was just nine years ago that the record time dropped below a second for the first time.
“Before you’ve even realized it’s solved, we’ve solved it,” says Patrohay. “Before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”
The super-speedy robot doing the solving has been named the Purdubik’s Cube, and it combines a number of different innovations. To begin with, the cube itself is redesigned and repackaged so it won’t break apart while being solved.
Then we have a machine vision system that’s able to recognize where the colored blocks are at any one time, plus special algorithms designed by the students that work out how the blocks need to be rotated to reach a solution as efficiently as possible.
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The team has also been able to refine the cube so that the acceleration and deceleration of the movements are optimized for sub-millisecond control. Add it all together, and you have a machine that sets new standards for high-speed objection manipulation.
“This achievement isn’t just about breaking a record, it pushes the boundaries of what synthetic systems can do,” says Nak-seung Patrick Hyun, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, who mentored the students.
“It brings us closer to understanding ultra-fast coordinated control systems like those found in nature.”
It was back in December, at a student design competition, when the Purdubik’s Cube made its first public appearance. Since then the engineers behind it have pushed it to work harder and harder – even setting up a remote Bluetooth link so that anyone could set the robot a challenge by scrambling up a cube to be solved.
If you’re wondering how human beings compare to the bots with this particular challenge, the record for the fastest solution is an astonishing 3.05 seconds, held by 7-year-old Xuanyi Geng from China. You might be surprised at just how many related world records there are: the record for solving a puzzle cube on a bicycle, for example, is 9.03 seconds.
And there’s plenty of history behind the new achievement. The Rubik’s Cube has been around since the 1970s, and the current world record holders were in part inspired by previous speed records.
“I always say that my inspiration was a previous world record holder,” says Patrohay.
“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.”
