A 9-year old boy from Xuzhou in our very own Jiangsu Province has broken the world record for the fastest-average time to solve a 3x3x3 rotating puzzle, also known famously as the Rubik’s Cube, with a staggering time of 4.69 seconds.
Wang Yiheng set the new world record in the recent semi-final of the Yong Jun KL Speedcubing 2023 event, held in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.
Yiheng took the record away from the joint holders, Max Park of the USA and Tymon Kolasiński of Poland, as GuinnessWorldRecords.com reported on 23 March.
For competition events of this sort, the World Cube Association (WCA) requires entrants to complete five “solves”, after which the fastest and slowest times are discounted, before calculating the average time between the remaining solves, to produce a final score.
Yiheng recorded times of 4.35, 3.91, 4.41, 5.31 and 6.16 seconds, to complete the three-dimensional, rotating puzzle, which many a layman could not perform in a lifetime.
Post COVID, speedcubing has been among the first such gaming meets to take place in Asia. Of the three speedcubing competitions he has entered in 2023, Yiheng has won the entire set.
In Singapore, he even defeated Xu Ruihang, who is one of only a handful of people on Earth to have completed a cube on camera in under 3 seconds. That achievement, however, did not qualify as a world record, since it was not performed in an official WCA competition, and as such was not recognised by Guinness World Records.
Yiheng is sponsored by Guangzhou-based, cube-manufacturer, GanCube. A world leader in the speedcube industry, GanCube has diversified the puzzle into spinoff products, such as a 2x2x2 version, an octagonal version and even a logic-defying pyramid which can twist and turn just like the original.
The Rubik’s Cube was an invention of Erno Rubik, a Hungarian professor who came up with the idea in 1974 as a teaching aid for his students.
But even after he had created it, Rubik himself required over a month of research to solve the puzzle. Speaking with CNN Business in 2012, Rubik said, “[I was] thinking to myself things like, ‘I have one side and one turn is 90 degrees and if you turn it four times I’ll be back where I was’, and so on. You have to find rules and then you find the law of symmetry, the law of movements”.
There are supposedly 43 quintillion possible combinations, but only one solution, for the Rubik’s Cube. It remains the biggest selling toy in history.
