At the Cubikon store in Munich, Germany, a new world record has been set for solving a Rubik's Cube. On January 23rd a robot completed the task in world record time of no more than 0.887 seconds! 

The machine is called the Sub1 and was produced by an industrial engineer and economist Adam Beer. At first, a World Cube Association-conform modified speed cube was gripped by the bot and randomly scrambled. Then it was placed in a ready-to-go position for the robot to solve. 

When the the start button was pressed on the Sub1, shutters were removed from two webcams trained on the cube, having each of them captured an image of three sides of the cube. The laptop then used these two pictures to identify the colours and calculate a solution using "Tomas Rokicki's implementation of Herbert Kociemba's two-phase algorithm." The solution was then passed through an Arduino-compatible microcontroller board that set in motion six high-performance steppers to sovle the cube in lightning-fast 20 moves.

A similar bot was created a little earlier that solved the Cube in 0.9 seconds, but as we know, the world of robotics changes and develops very fast, so it's no wonder that this new record managed to beat the previous one by sheer 0.003 seconds. And it didn't take years or decades to break the record, it was a matter of days.

The latest world record still needs to be investigated and approved by Guinness World Records. But perhaps by the time it's approved, there will already be another robot built, solving the Cube in just under 8 seconds? 

See the record attempt below.