Rubik Cube Record Broken: Made in Hungary, Mastered in US

  • 19 Jun 2023 2:49 PM
Rubik Cube Record Broken: Made in Hungary, Mastered in US
Max Park has just broken the world record for solving the Rubik’s Cube, aligning all the colours on the 3x3x3 puzzle in an amazing 3.13 seconds.

The 21-year-old, a world champion at 15 and featured on the Netflix documentary ‘The Speed Cubers’, smashed the previous best set by China’s Yusheng Du in 2018 of 3.47 seconds. The event took place in Long Beach, California.

The Cube’s inventor is Hungarian Ernő Rubik, a Budapest resident now in his late seventies, who hit upon the idea in the 1970s when he was a professor of architecture at the city’s Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts. Patented as a toy, it became a worldwide craze in the 1980s.

It is thought that one in seven people in the world has tried to crack the code by twiddling the moveable squares so that all the panels on each side are of the same colour.

The Rubik’s Cube is also synonymous with Hungary, celebrated in giant mural form on Rumbach Sebestyén utca near the Great Synagogue.

The inventor published a successful book, ‘Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All’, in 2020.

Words by Peterjon Cresswell for Xpatloop.com
Peterjon has been researching the byways of Budapest for 30 years, extending his expertise across Europe to produce guidebooks for Time Out and his own website liberoguide.com

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