Rubik's Cube Record Broken

martinX writes "The Courier Mail has a story about a San Fran software developer who spins the cube faster than anyone else on the planet: 20 seconds to solve Rubik's Cube. I didn't think anyone still played with them." The winner, Dan Knights, said "It's sort of a dream come true", and credited Jessica Fridrich's cube-solving method as the key to winning, leaving the originator of the method in second place at the World Rubik's Cube Championships in Toronto at the weekend.

Comments

Re:Video?

[jnana]

You can see the creator of the Fridrich method solve the cube here: http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/video.html

Re:initial state of cube?

[zero_offset]

From the rules:

Scrambling:
In all portions of the championship, puzzles will be scrambled using random moves generated by computer. The same sequences of random moves will be applied to the puzzle of each competitor to ensure each competitor will be starting with the same random puzzle state. This same method of scrambling will be used during the averages or best of 3 ?- type portions of competition. These random moves will be applied by independent jury-members.

The number of random moves depends on the puzzle. See the below example for explanation.

Rubiks 3x3x3: 25 moves
Rubiks 4x4x4, 40 moves
Rubiks 5x5x5, other: 60 moves etc

But what I REALLY want to know is, how the hell do you solve a cube while blindfolded? Seriously, there are three categories of blindfolded competitions.

Re:initial state of cube?

[Soul-Burn666]

In some competitions you are allowed to examine the cube before actually moving parts... So this might be the case.

If i'm not mistaken, the fastest for a pre-examined cube is something like 9 secs.

I think this is a real problem

[JMZero]

I'm no expert on the cube (it takes me a couple minutes), but it seems to me the competition would be very much influenced by "free stuff" (ie. steps in solving that you don't have to do). From a solving perspective, there's all sorts of situations you can run into and they are not equally favorable.

It's also pointless to standardize the number of turns used in randomization. Beyond a trivial number of turns (say, about 10 - maybe 15 for a pro), the cube is randomized enough that you'll be "starting from scratch" (ie, it's likely your first turns will be moving it further from solved, but towards a situation you can deal with).

I've seen someone solve a cube in 13 seconds. They were moving fast, but they also admitted they got lucky.