Clever, quick-fingered solvers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished with a Rubik’s Cube.

I’ve seen the world’s most complex Rubik’s-style cube being solved, a building turned into a solvable Rubik’s Cube, and a Rubik’s Cube solved one move at a time by strangers across the globe.

I’ve even seen a Rubik’s Cube solved during a skydive.

But, amidst all those amazing achievements, there has been something lurking in the background. Over the years, there has been an escalating cold war in the world of Rubik’s Cubes.

The two sides? Human and machine.

The battlefield? Speed-solving.

Human speed-solvers often count their records in seconds, not minutes. The current record for a 3×3 cube solve is 3.05 seconds!

But speed-solving devices are often so fast that they end up ripping the cube to pieces instead of completing the solve. So puzzly designers must carefully walk a tightrope between speed and power in order to challenge speed records for mechanical solvers.

The record for an automated solve is an astonishing 0.305 seconds – ten times faster than the fastest human solve! — set by Mitsubishi Electric engineers in Japan in May 2024.

Or it was, until a few days ago.

The new Guinness World Record for “Fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube” belongs to Purdubik’s Cube, the robot created by Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay, and Alex Berta, a team of students from Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The new record? 0.103 seconds.

It’s hard to fathom how quick that is. Thankfully, one of Purdubik’s Cube’s creators has an apt analogy:

“We solve in 103 milliseconds,” Patrohay said. “A human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds. So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”

Utilizing a combination of color recognition and finely-tuned industrial-grade motion-control hardware — guided by algorithms written by the students themselves — Purdubik’s Cube carefully accelerates and decelerates its movements faster than the eye can see.

And despite the fact that a team of four college students smashed a record previously held by a billion-dollar corporation, they’re not done yet.

They aspire to solve a Rubik’s Cube with Purdubik’s Cube in less than a tenth of a second! I don’t know how they expect to shave a few milliseconds off their time to achieve their goal, but you know what? I fully believe they can do it. In less than a year, they set their goal of a new Guinness World Record and achieved it.

Who knows what they’ll achieve next?

[You can read the full story of their journey from the initial goal to their world record success on the Purdue Engineering website. I highly recommend it!]