A group of students at Purdue University, Indiana, USA, have smashed the previous Guinness World Record of solving a Rubik's cube once held by Mitsubishi, a Japanese conglomerate worth nearly $80 billion. The high-speed robot is called the Purdubik's Cube, which managed to solve the puzzle cube in a blink-it-and-you-miss-it 0.103 milliseconds.
Matthew Patrohay, the lead of the project, was inspired by the previous record holder and wanted to make his own attempt at the record. After gathering his friends, Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, and Alex Berta, the team managed to beat Mitsubishi's record by two-tenths of a second, according to Purdue University.
"To put it in perspective, the human blink is 200 to 300 milliseconds. So we're significantly faster than that. Human reaction time is about .200 milliseconds as well, so we're faster than that," said Mr Patrohay.
Talking about the challenges in developing the machine, the researchers said they had to redesign the cube so that it could withstand the tremendous force required to solve it within milliseconds.
“The cubes themselves just disintegrate,” said Mr Patrohay. “The pieces themselves snap in half and fall apart.”
Social media reacts
The video of the machine in action has gone viral on social media, inviting puzzled reactions from the users, who cannot believe the cube was solved in a blink.
"WOW. I literally blinked and missed it the first time. Absolutely insane," said one user while another added: "I had to watch it a couple of times because it looked like they just clipped it to show the finished cube."
A third commented: "It is even more impressive to me that they built a cube capable of being solved that quickly without disintegrating."
The rapid machine was first unveiled at SPARK, Purdue's Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) student design competition, where it took home first place in December 2024. The team continued to build on the success by pushing the limits of automation and high-speed computing.
The achievement is made more remarkable by the fact that Purdubik's Cube is highly intuitive and interactive. Using a Bluetooth-enabled "Smart Cube," users can scramble the puzzle in real time, and the robot mirrors every move, solving the cube instantly once the scramble is complete.
