Hip to be square: Rubik’s Cube turns 40
Forty years after the puzzle was invented, a new generation of Rubik's cubers are taking the sport to extremes, writes Ian Scheffler
On a low stage, a young man examines a Rubik's Cube. Around him, an audience stands, precariously, on tables and chairs, or peering down from skyboxes. In one fluid motion, he activates a timer on the table before him and his fingers disappear in a blur of activity. When he sets the puzzle down and stops the timer, just seconds later, the audience erupts, nearly drowning out the announcer: "Feliks with a 7.95!"
Feliks Zemdegs has been here before. In 2011, when he was 15 years old, he travelled to Bangkok, Thailand, from his native Melbourne, Australia, to attend the biennial World Rubik's Cube Championship for the first time. The year before, he had become the first person to solve the puzzle in fewer than 10 seconds on average. As a result, he had become something of a celebrity, at least in a certain world.
On the online forums where competitive Rubik's Cube solvers congregate, he had been compared to Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt. In Bangkok, at the championship, he was asked for autographs and pictures. And, at first, he seemed ready to justify his fame. In the early heats, he blew past the field. But, in the finals, his nerves betrayed him.
Now, two years later, in Las Vegas, in the United States, Zemdegs exhales and closes his eyes. Two solves down, three to go.
And he certainly couldn't have imagined that, one day, his puzzle would be at the centre of a competitive sport in which the top performers can solve it in less time than it takes to read this sentence aloud.
The first Rubik's Cube competitions began in the early 1980s and were largely a promotional affair that vanished with the collapse of the initial fad for the puzzle. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, the internet allowed hobbyists around the world to find each other and run competitions of their own. More than 1,700 competitions have taken place in 66 countries since the 2004 founding of the World Cube Association, a governing body modelled on Fifa, the arbiter of international football. (Unlike football, however, there is no qualification for any of these tournaments, including the World Championship: anyone can sign up.)
Most cubers, as competitors are known as, are young, male and have an aptitude for maths and science. And yet, as Mats Valk, the Dutch teenager who currently holds the world record for a single solve - 5.55 seconds - insists at the most recent World Championship, in Las Vegas, "If you look at the top, there are actually, like, no nerds at all. Like, me, Feliks, Cornelius - we are not nerds."
And it's true. Valk, Zemdegs and Cornelius Dieckmann, an 18-year-old from Berlin, Germany, all appear to be well-adjusted teens. Valk, who is tall and lanky with sandy blond hair, has an easy smile and outgoing demeanour. Zemdegs, whose dark hair and angular features recall the tennis player Novak Djokovic, recently entered the University of Melbourne, where he is pursuing degrees in engineering and business. Dieckmann, who plays classic rock and blues guitar, has a passion for British and American fiction.
But hand one of them a Rubik's Cube and you will see a seemingly normal person transform into a being capable of prodigious feats. Jeannine Michaelsen is a German television presenter who has come to the World Championship to film a segment for , a news magazine produced by ZDF, one of the country's most popular channels. "We all think, 'Oh, this looks amazing,'" she says of the sports she typically covers, such as base jumping and big-wave surfing. "But, of course, we know they can do it. But this? If you see this in person, it's, like, 'How the f**k do you do that?'"
The World Cube Association, the governing body of speedsolving, speedcubing or cubing, as it is variously known, requires competitors to attempt five solves, the best and worst of which are eliminated, and the other three times are averaged to make sure that nothing is decided by chance. Before each solve, puzzles are scrambled according to a computer program, to ensure that all competitors begin from the same positions. Zemdegs has probably never seen the particular scramble he has just undone: any single Rubik's Cube can be arranged in more than 43 quintillion ways.
In real time, what a cuber such as Zemdegs or Valk is doing is almost impossible to make out. At times, it looks like the pieces fall into place as they shake the puzzle vigorously. The blur is due, in part, to advances in puzzle technology; hardly anyone actually uses an old-style Rubik's Cube in competition anymore. Most cubers employ models designed in China in which the interior mechanism that Rubik originally designed has been revamped to minimise friction. (Occasionally, faster puzzles pose problems. An overzealous turn can cause them to misalign or, in extreme cases, explode.)
When Rubik invented his cube, he had little idea how to solve it. No matter which way he turned the puzzle, the colours seemed only to get more mixed up. Still, he refused to believe that it couldn't be solved.
"It was a code I myself had invented!" he wrote in an unpublished manuscript, quoted in a 1986 magazine profile. "Yet I could not read it."
Eventually, Rubik began to develop sequences of moves that would allow him to rearrange a few pieces of the puzzle at a time. First, he aligned the corners. Then, he attacked the edges. After about a month, he could solve the puzzle at will.
Rubik's solution - known, for obvious reasons, as the "corners-first" method - is only one of several ways to solve the cube. You can assemble it layer by layer, like a baker putting together a cake. Or you can build blocks of matching pieces and then connect them, as if you were playing with Lego blocks. The most popular method among cubers is an advanced layer-by-layer technique called the Fridrich Method, after Jessica Fridrich, a professor of engineering at Binghamton University, New York, and the 1982 Czech National Champion, who helped to develop it. It's known alternatively as CFOP, an acronym for the steps involved: cross, first two layers, orientation of the last layer and permutation of the last layer.
"It's the same house, perhaps," Fridrich told me last year, "but with completely different furniture."
She devised all of her algorithms - sequences of moves with a discrete effect on the puzzle - by hand. Today, cubers can generate dozens of alternatives using computers. Fridrich laments that so many cubers now use the same method - "It's all been optimised to death" - but is astounded by the speed of her heirs. "I always thought that the limits of speedcubing were, like, at 13 seconds," she said. "And what's happening today is just nothing short of a miracle."
The biggest factor in the speed of today's cubers has more to do with practice than anything else. Wayne Gretzky, the greatest ice-hockey player of all time, could predict where the puck would travel before it arrived - a skill he attributed not to innate talent, but simply to his father's coaching. The same principle applies in cubing. Having solved the puzzle so many times, elite cubers such as Valk, Zemdegs and Dieckmann are able to visualise what it will look like several steps in advance - an ability known in the sport as "look ahead" - so that, once the solve begins, they rarely have to pause to figure out their next move.
"Look ahead is the biggest part," Dieckmann says. "It's even more important than turning fast."
Looking ahead requires enormous concentration, and can be easily derailed by anxiety. So cubers have come up with various ways to calm their nerves. Some don the sort of industrial-grade earmuffs worn by airport personnel. Andy Smith, a teenager from New Jersey, carries a handkerchief - on which his mother embroidered a Rubik's Cube - to wipe the sweat from his hands before he begins solving.
When it works, though, look ahead has an uncanny effect, allowing cubers to link moves so seamlessly that their reflexes seem superhuman. On average, CFOP requires 56 twists to solve the Rubik's Cube. During the 15 seconds in which competitors are allowed to inspect the puzzle, most are able to plan out a handful of moves. The best never stop looking ahead, and can sustain speeds of nearly 10 turns per second. Look ahead demands such concentration that, some cubers say, it alters their perception of time.
"In an ideal solve," says Stefan Huber, the top-ranked cuber in Austria, "you don't have the feeling that you were turning fast. You were just turning at a comfortable pace, and, in the end, sometimes I have the experience, when I watch the video, I have the feeling, 'Oh, it really looked fast.' But I didn't have the feeling that it was that fast."
Hardly any of this is conscious.
"I don't know how to explain it," Zemdegs says, "but you don't, you don't really think. You just do it."
"Oh that's s**t, that's s**t," says one cuber of Zemdegs' last solve - 9.12 seconds, his slowest of the Las Vegas finals. But it doesn't matter. Zemdegs has won the title, with an average of 8.18 seconds.
He is immediately surrounded by a scrum while Valk, who came in second, stands off to the side. Although, in some ways, victory is beside the point - for many of the nearly 600 cubers in attendance, a record, the World Championship is more about hanging out with other cubers, some of whom they have never met offline.
But Valk is nevertheless disappointed. On his final solve, he was penalised two seconds because his puzzle had been misaligned by slightly more than the allowable limit.
Still, before Zemdegs accepts his prizes - US$3,000 for winning, and hundreds more for the other contests in which he had placed, including solving the puzzle one-handed - Valk seems to cheer up.
After all, in the makeshift green room, moments before taking the stage, he had given encouragement to a pale and nervous Zemdegs.
"We can do this," he said. "No, you can do this. Seriously, you deserve to win."
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