The Guinness World Record for the fastest a human can solve a Rubik’s Cube is 4.69 seconds. The record for the fastest a robot could solve it, thus far, was 0.637 seconds. You wouldn’t think it’s possible, even for a robot, to beat that!
But a robot from MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab has just (unofficially) broken the record by solving the Rubik’s cube in a mind-bending 0.38 seconds, as you can see in the video (above). Of course, now that the moves for solving the cube are known, speed is really matter of mechanical dexterity.
The robot in the video above was created by Ben Katz, a robotics student, and software developer Jared Di Carlo. At first, it looks like the puzzle was magically solved in one turn. However, the video slows down to show exactly how the robot solved the cube.
The duo who made the robot claimed in a blog post that the machine can actually go faster, except the tuning process was time consuming and often ended up in mistakes, like the “cubesplosion” in the video below. Citing that they have “lost interest in playing the tuning games” for now, the two said they may return to the robot eventually and attempt to solve the puzzle even faster.
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