A New Robot Can Solve a Rubik’s Cube Faster Than the Average Person Can Blink — Watch the Astonishing Video

Purdue University undergraduates designed the robot, which they have dubbed the “Purdubik’s Cube”

• A team of four students at Purdue University has built a robot that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in about one-tenth of a second
• The robot, which the team has dubbed the “Purdubik’s Cube,” solves the puzzle faster than most people can blink
• The new record smashes the previous record (nearly four-tenths of a second) set by engineers in Japan in 2024

A team of students from Purdue University has created a robot that can solve a Rubik’s Cube faster than the average person can blink.

Matthew Patrohay, Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd and Alex Berta are students at Purdue's Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in West Lafayette, Ind., and their machine can solve a Rubik’s Cube in about a tenth of a second.

“We solve in 103 milliseconds. A human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds. So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it,” Patrohay said in a profile on Purdue’s website.

The robot, which the team has dubbed the “Purdubik’s Cube,” was awarded “fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube" by Guinness World Records in April. It solves the cube nearly three times faster than the previous record-holding robot, which was set by Mitsubishi Electric engineers in Japan in May 2024.

In the Purdue profile, Patrohay revealed that he had wanted to build a machine that would smash the Rubik’s Cube solve time since he was in high school.

“I always say that my inspiration was a previous world record holder,” he said. “Back in high school, I saw a video of MIT students solving the cube in 380 milliseconds. I thought, ‘That’s a really cool project. I’d love to try and beat it someday.’ Now here I am at Purdue — proving we can go even faster.”

The team credits their school’s co-op program — which enables Purdue students to attain real-world experience in industries related to their fields of study — with helping them get the Purdubik’s Cube project off the ground.

“Our team came together because of the co-op program,” Hurd explained. “It helped us build not only the friendships that led to this collaboration, but also the professional and technical skills we needed to actually pull it off."

And how, exactly, does the robot work?

According to the university, the Purdubik’s Cube uses “machine vision for color recognition,” along with “custom solving algorithms” to optimize execution time. Every movement is also highly refined and “precisely coordinated” in order to make each and every movement as fast as possible.  

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Additionally, the team designed an interactive element to the model, which enables users to scramble the cube tube via Bluetooth, as well as press a button to then watch the machine solve the puzzle.

The record for the fastest human time to solve a Rubik’s Cube was set by Max Park of Cerritos, Calif., with a time of just over three seconds.