12-Year-Old Solves 3 Rubiks Cubes At Once While Juggling Them
Well, I’m all out of bad takes on LeBron James memory skills today, so allow me to switch it up with a truly impressive feat of the mind:
At age 7, China’s Que Jianyu was solving Rubiks Cubes blindfolded. Now 12, he’s able to solve three of them at once.. while juggling (before a large audience no less). For his performance above, he made it into the Guinness World Records. Pretty impressive considering less than 5.8% of the world’s population can solve the cube. I used to peel the stickers off & move them around until it looked like I finished. Does that count?
Seeing as I’m pretty square myself (heyyyyyo) I went down a rabbit hole of facts from the game:
-The world’s largest Rubik’s Cube is three metres tall – the smallest is just 10mm wide. Both turn just like a regular cube.
-The most complex Rubiks Cube is 17x17x17 and takes days to solve.
-No one who has ever solved the mega-cube has ever solved how to engage in sexual intercourse
-There are more than 43 quintillion ways to scramble the basic Rubik’s Cube – that’s 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possibilities.
-If you turn The Rubik’s Cube once every second, it will take you 1.4 trillion years to go through all the options. (The universe is just 14 billion years old)
-Every legal, regulation Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less.
-The first world championship was held in 1982 – with a winning solve time of 22.95 seconds.
-The current world record for solving The Rubik’s Cube is an amazing 4.59 seconds. (SeungBeom Cho, Korea).
-A robot solved The Rubik’s Cube in 0.38 seconds.
-Over 350 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold worldwide. It’s the best-selling toy of all time.
-The most valuable cube ever made is the Masterpiece Cube, valued at $1.5m:
-This 18-carat cube with lots of precious stones (including rubies and emeralds) was created in 1995 by Diamond Cutters International.
-Speedcubes are different to regular Rubik’s cubes. They look the same – but a speed cube is lighter and easier to turn, making it faster to use.
-There is a World Cube Association that holds Speedcube contests around the globe. In fact, there are official competitions being held this weekend in Idaho, Indiana, California & Alabama.
-There’s a whole Rubiks Lyfe culture out there, complete with memes I do not understand. This includes people who seem to ‘Cube for Christ’.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I like to imagine there’s a bad boy of the Rubiks Cube world. Rolling into the speed cube competition wearing an innappropriate t-shirt about getting box, leather jacket slung over his shoulder, puffin’ on a vape as he slams his speed cube down before the judges… A girl can dream…