Speedcubing: A careful combination of luck and skill

It was just like any other competition Yusheng Du told himself, the nerves he had before every solve in competition had been with him for the past three years, since he started joining competitions. It was his 24th competition, there wasn’t anything special about it, yet he felt very nervous.

43,252,003,274,489,856,856,000.

That’s how many possible Rubik’s Cube scrambles there are. That’s right; more possible scrambles than grains of sand on Earth. And yet every now and then a YouTube video goes viral showing some kid prodigy solving a cube in mere seconds.

These people are speedcubers, or cubers for short. They train for months, even years, memorizing hundreds to thousands of ‘algorithms’, pre-memorized series of turns and rotations to help them solve a cube as fast as possible.

The date is November 24. The year, 2018. In Wuhu, China, the first round of the 3x3x3 event for the Wuhu Open 2018 has just begun. A certain Yusheng Du sits down for his first solve of the morning. He gets an 11.13 second solve. Not the best for him. As he walks away, disappointed, to wait for his next solve, he didn’t know that a historical moment was just seconds away.

Speedcubing competitions typically use the Average of 5 or Ao5 for short to rank competitors. Competitors solve the cube five times. The fastest and slowest times are removed, and the middle three are averaged together. The World Cube Association, the governing body for twisty puzzles such as the Rubik’s Cube, ranks cubers in two ways; the fastest average the cuber has gotten, and the fastest single solve the cuber has gotten (known as a ‘single’.)

On May 6, 2018 in Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, one of the world’s top speedcubers, Feliks Zemdegs, got a 4.22 second single for the 3x3x3 cube, beating the world record of 4.59 seconds at the time (which was unsurprisingly, also held by him.) Much like track and field, split seconds can mean the difference between a decent time, and a world record.

Feliks, interviewed on the Cubing Encoded YouTube channel, wrote “I woke up in the morning to find out [the world record] had been broken. Initially, when I saw a bunch of posts, I thought it might not have been real, because there have certainly been hoaxes, misscrambles, and fake solves in the past. I think it was completely natural that a 3.47 single in a 9.00 average aroused suspicion. However, once I read a bit more, and saw the security camera footage as well as the reconstruction, I realized it was completely legitimate. Mats Valk (another legendary cuber) was sleeping in the bed next to me, and so I woke him up to tell him the news, he had the same reaction - didn’t believe that it happened, and then took a look at the solve and reconstruction.”

Yusheng Du wasn’t even recording his solves, as he didn’t expect to be any good, much less have any chance to break the world record. The photo above was taken from the security cameras of the venue.

After a while, people began asking themselves; how long would it take to break it?

More than five years later, the record is still unbroken. Whenever I go into a cubing competition, my mind always settles on that moment. Yusheng Du showed the world that you didn’t have to be a legend or a celebrity to do something spectacular, and that with enough hard work, anything is possible.