M2M Day 86: Rubik’s Cube in 10 seconds?
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.
Yesterday, I officially completed this month’s challenge, solving the Rubik’s Cube in 17.704 seconds.
And while this month’s challenge is over, I still have further Rubik’s Cube aspirations…
Sub-20 average of five
In competition, there are two main speed cubing events: single solve and average of five. Yesterday, I completed a sub-20 single solve (i.e. I solved the cube one time in under 20 seconds). However, I have not yet completed a sub-20 average of five (where the average of five solves, excluding the top and bottom times, is less than 20 seconds).
This is the next goal I’m striving towards. It’s even perhaps possible for me to achieve this before the end of January.
Sub-10 single
Solving the Rubik’s Cube in single-digit seconds is a feat only reserved for a minority of top speed cubers. I have a lot of work to do to cut my current time in half, but, perhaps with a little luck, I could do it within another month or two of practice.
Sub-60 Blindfolded
I’ve previously experimented with blindfolded solving, but I’m horribly slow (it takes me about 10 minutes to memorize the cube and 2 minutes to solve). I would love to be able to both memorize and solve in under 60 seconds.
Fewest Moves Challenge (FMC)
Outside the realm of speed cubing is a Rubik’s Cube event called Fewest Moves Challenge or FMC. With FMC, you are given a scrambled cube, paper and pencil, and one hours; and your objective is to find the most efficient solve for that particular scramble. In other words, the goal is to find the solve that uses the fewest moves (that aren’t just a reversal of the scramble itself).
To me, the part of FMC that is particularly interesting is called God’s Number. Basically, some researchers at Google determined that every possible Rubik’s Cube scramble can be completed in 20 moves or less. Thus, the number 20 is considered God’s Number (since god should be able to solve any Rubik’s Cube in no more than 20 moves).
The implications for FMC are clear: Can I beat God’s Number and find an optimal solve that is less than 20 moves?
The crazy thing is… in competition, three cubers (Marcel Peters, Tim Wong, and Vladislav Ushakov) have outperformed God’s Number and solved the cube in only 19 moves.
I would love to be the fourth.
Anyway, I share these challenges because I think they’re interesting, I’m inspired to pursue them, and I wanted to demonstrate the diversity of pursuits available even in such a narrow discipline like cubing.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
