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Robot solves Rubik's Cube faster than the average person can blink: Watch

Need to know

  • A team of four students at Purdue University built a robot that can solve a rubic cube in about a tenth of a second
  • The robot, which the team referred to as “Purdubik's Cube”, solves the puzzle faster than most people can blink
  • The new record destroys the previous record (almost four tenths of a second), which was determined by engineers in Japan in 2024

A team of Purdue University team has created a robot that can solve a ruby ​​cube faster than the average person can flash.

Matthew Patrohay, Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd and Alex Berta are students of the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in West Lafayette, Ind., And their machine can solve a tenth of a second in about one second.

“We solve in 103 milliseconds. A human blink lasts about 200 to 300 milliseconds. Before you even find that it is moving, we solved it,” said Patrahay in a profile on the Purdue website.

The robot, which the team referred to as “Purdubik's Cube”, was awarded in April by Guinness World Records “Fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube”. It solves the cube almost three times faster than the previous record robot, which was discontinued by Mitsubishi Electric Engineers in Japan in May 2024.

In the Purdue profile, Patrahay revealed that he wanted to build a machine that would smash the Rubik's Cube solving time of time since he was in high school.

“I always say that my inspiration was an earlier world record holder,” he said. “Back in the high school I saw a video of MIT students who loved the cube in 380 milliseconds. I thought: 'This is a really cool project. I would like to try to hit it one day.' Now I am here at Purdue and evidence that we can go even faster.

The team writes the co-op program of their school-the-das it enables Purdue students to gain real experiences in industries in connection with their fields of study, in the process of getting the Purdubik's Cube project.

“Our team came together because of the co-op program,” said Hurd. “It helped us not only build the friendships that led to this collaboration, but also the professional and technical skills we had to do to actually create them.”

A person who holds a pull cube (stock image).

Amy T. Zielinski/Redferns via Getty


And how exactly does the robot work?

According to the university, Purdubik's Cube uses “Machine Vision for Color recognition” and “custom solution algorithms” to optimize the execution time. Every movement is also heavily refined and “precisely coordinated” in order to make every movement as soon as possible.

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In addition, the team designed an interactive element to the model with which the user can rummage the cube tube via Bluetooth and press a button to observe how the machine loosens the puzzle.

The record for the fastest human time to solve a ruby ​​cube was determined by Max Park from Cerritos, California, with a time of a little more than three seconds.

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