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

20 seconds???????

[Eager Newbie]

That's way faster than I could solve the cube...

By peeling and re-applying the stickers.

Re:Video?

[jnana]

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

Solve times

[Kethinov]

I know a guy who can solve them in under 3 minutes. He memorized all the algorithms and so on. Fascinating concept. I never knew they were actually solvable until I met him. A lot of people joke that "oh gimme a screwdriver and I'll solve it" but when you break it down step by step, they actually do have a simple set of steps that can be taken to solve them, like any other logic problem. Although he did tell me that they can be taken apart and rearranged in such a way that they CAN be made unsolvable. He told me "never try to solve a cube until you've seen it solved. You never know what kinds of assholes will stack the deck on you to make you look stupid."

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.