It was fair and square.
A specially designed Mistubuishi robot in Japan set a remarkable Guinness World Record for solving a Rubik’s Cube in a split second.
The champion TOKUI Fast Accurate Synchronized Motion Testing Robot spun the colorful six-faced puzzle in a mere 0.305 seconds, outdoing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology bot’s 0.38-second record from 2018.
It was significantly quicker than human record-holder Max Park’s “holy grail” time of 3.13 seconds in 2023.
“Shaving off time as much as possible was difficult, but it was fun at the same time,” Tokui, the project’s leading engineer after who, the robot is named, told Guinness.
“I checked the videos of the previous record holder, and I felt that the motor we have is better than theirs,” he said.
“So I was confident that we can beat them with speed.”
Turns out Tokui, who usually handles motor-related products for the electronics manufacturer, first made it too fast for its own good and had to troubleshoot.
If the four-sided, quick-spinning mechanism cranked the cube too hard it would cause a jam in the puzzle, as Tokui and the team learned on their first official attempt at the record.
However, the second try — Smithsonian Magazine reported a 20-minute tweaking session was done after the initial attempt — became a record-clinching success in late May.
The success was thanks to the company’s signal-responsive motors along with an artificially intelligent color-recognizing algorithm proprietary to Mitsubishi.
“I know that our products can make the world an even better place,” Tokui said about the tech behind the record-breaking feat. “I hope the record will allow people everywhere to know what our products are capable of.”
