Yes, you read that correctly. A Rubik's cube was completed in the blink of the eye. WTF?
Quicker than a snap of the fingers it doesn’t have, a robot just shattered the world speed record for solving a Rubik’s Cube, completing the puzzle in just 0.305 seconds.
Built by a team of engineers from Mitsubishi Electric, the TOKUI Fast Accurate Synchronized Motion Testing Robot (TOKUFASTbot) edged the previous record - set by a robot developed by MIT students in 2018 - by 0.075 seconds.
“I checked the videos of the previous record holder, and I felt that the motor we have is better than theirs,” Tokui, an engineer at Mitsubishi and the team’s lead, tells Guinness World Records. “So I was confident that we can beat them with speed.”
Since its invention in 1974, the Rubik’s Cube has exploded in popularity, eventually becoming the most popular puzzle toy in the world. At its core, the puzzle is simple: Each of the cube’s six faces has nine coloured squares, and the solver must rotate the toy in a way that gets every side to have a uniform colour. But even on the standard three-by-three cube, the colours can be arranged in more than 43 quintillion different ways.
Want to watch the robot in action? Here it is (but don't blink)...