M2M Day 82: I solved a Rubik’s Cube in 20 seconds, but that’s not quite fast enough
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For January, my goal is to solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 20 seconds.
Today, since it wasn’t raining for the first time in a while, I spent most of the morning and afternoon walking laps around San Francisco listening to an audiobook. Currently, I’m listening to Spaceman by astronaut Mike Massimino (if you’re interested, here’s my book list from 2016).
I got home around 5:30pm, and decided to film a few Rubik’s Cube solves before dinner.
On my second attempt, I solved the cube in 20.720 seconds, only 0.73 seconds away from this month’s goal and my fastest solve on video so far.
The solve before this one, I completed in 21.787. The solve after, in 21.146.
I’m so consistently executing solves around the 20-second mark that I’m surprised I haven’t filmed a sub-20 attempt yet. It seems like there should be way more variance and luck involved here. Especially since my knowledge and execution abilities of the Rubik’s Cube algorithms aren’t uniformly distributed.
I’m not complaining about my consistency. I think it’s a good thing. It just doesn’t seem mathematically possible.
Anyway, I’ll continue focusing on systemically lowering my average solve time. That’s probably better than relying on variance anyway.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
