A pair of brothers in the U.K. have officially broken the Guinness World Record for the fastest time solving a four-by-four Rubik’s Cube with a robot. Their DIY machine, which the brothers call The Revenger, completed the puzzle in only 45.3 seconds. That’s 33 seconds faster than the next fastest robot. If that wasn’t enough, the 45.3-second record actually breaks the 55-second record their own robot set just a few tries earlier.
Not too shabby for a pair of undergraduate students.
Matthew and Thomas Pidden built their robot over the course of 15 weeks during Matthew’s time at the University of Bristol. The robot consists of two parts: a physical body and a software component. A pair of dual webcams scan the cube, while two custom-built robot arms grab and manipulate it. A nearby laptop runs a specially coded algorithm (basically the robot’s brain) which analyzes data from the webcams and quickly calculates how to move the cube. During the trials, the webcams were blocked with a pair of plastic shutters until the timer started, to ensure that the machine didn’t get a head start.
The robot’s attempts at breaking the record took place last year at the university, but were just made official by the Guinness World Records this week.
“I decided to break the record as part of my undergraduate final project,” Matthew Pidden told the Guinness Book of World Records. “I have always enjoyed Rubik’s Cubes as a child and computer science. Combining the two felt like a natural progression and a great project.”
Related: [The inventor of the Rubik’s cube doesn’t get why it’s so popular]
The Pidden brothers’ robot completed the cube a total of six times. However, it wasn’t an immediate success. The first two attempts failed to break the previous world record, but the third shattered it at 55 seconds. Even then, the brothers were confident their robot still had more in it. After more trials, it nailed the current record of 45.3 seconds on the sixth attempt. A crowd attending the event cheered in the background, as each of the cube’s faces displayed a single color.
Even faster cube-solving robots
If 45 seconds seems somewhat slow for the fastest robot-solved Rubik’s Cube ever, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. This record is specifically for the 4x4x4 cube. The original 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube, invented by Hungarian sculptor Ernő Rubik in 1974, has been solved significantly faster. We’re talking down to a fraction of a second. Currently, the world record for the fastest time a robot has solved one is 0.103 seconds—faster than the blink of an eye. That feat was accomplished by a team of engineering students at Purdue University.By contrast, the fastest time for a human to solve an original Rubik’s cube is a remarkable 2.76 seconds. Sure, it might be a bit slower but that’s still pretty impressive for a human. Even more so when you consider said human was just 9 years old.
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