This video of the blazingly fast CubeStormer II setting a new world record for solving a Rubik's Cube is all the more impressive given it's built with LEGO Mindstorms and powered by a Samsung Galaxy S II.


The previous record for solving a Rubik's Cube was 5.66 seconds, held by Australian Feliks Zemdegs. It was one of the last remaining tactical advantages mankind held over the machines, but now it's gone. Because Mike Dobson and David Gilday's CubeStormer II has managed to one-up Feliks with a time of 5.352 seconds. Adding insult to injury, human solvers are actually allowed to study the cube before the clock starts. But the CubeStormer II's time includes the mere moments it needed to look it over.

We should all hang our collective heads even lower given the CubeStormer II is built from four LEGO Mindstorm NXT kits, controlled by a custom Android app doing the actual solving. After snapping a photo of each side of the scrambled cube, the app uses a specially developed algorithm to create a solution that's optimized for the solver's gripping mechanism. So in the future if someone set out to build a cube solving robot that wasn't constructed from a building toy, even this record wouldn't stand a chance. [CubeStormer II via DVICE]


Update: This post previously incorrectly referred to the CubeStormer as the CubeSolver, and the reporter responsible has been suitably flogged.