from Hacker News

The Rubik’s cube world record has been broken at 3.13 seconds [video]

by axelfontaine on 6/15/23, 5:05 AM with 15 comments

• by NoZebra120vClip on 6/15/23, 5:55 AM

  I was obsessed with Rubik in my youth, and I had a few of those solution tutorial books that told you all the patterns to take to solve the cube from any possible scramble.

  My personal best time was 63 seconds.

  I owned both official and knock-off cubes, and I found the official cube far superior, merely for reasons of coloring, and also solid construction; it was smoother and it was much less likely to explode in my hands as I cubed at top speed.

  I spent inordinate amounts of time in the upstairs bathroom lubricating my cubes with a big tub of Vaseline. My parents never confronted me or even seemed to wonder what I was doing in there; I suppose it was still a bit too early for us to worry about anything morally questionable. But I did go through a lot of Vaseline.

• by davidpfarrell on 6/15/23, 3:24 PM

  Fun short story: I was the owner of the PuzzleProz ebay store in the mid 00's which was, for awhile, the most popular source of "knock off" speed cubes in the US.

  I actually sold Max's family the Red speed cube that you can see him using as a kid in the Netflix documentary "The Speed Cubers"

  I have that same cube (model / color) on my desk right now as its one of my favorites.

  It was exciting to see the cube in the documentary and to be sure I went back through my order history and found the order.

  It was really fun to be part of the speed cubing / puzzle cube community during that time.

• by itisit on 6/15/23, 5:32 AM

  Really curious to know the guidelines for the state of the unsolved cube. Clearly some configurations are faster to solve than others discounting the speed of the solver.

• by d2049 on 6/15/23, 6:40 AM

  That's Max Park. I'm not a cuber but I recognize him from the excellent short documentary The Speed Cubers, on Netflix. It's nerdy, engaging, and heartwarming — perfect for HN.

• by noman-land on 6/15/23, 5:30 AM

  Unreal. 5 seconds was not broken too long ago. Crazy to see the 3 second barrier looking like a possibility. Pretty astonishing. Is it even possible without skipping some steps?