Speed Cubing at Caltech / Rubik's Cube By John Geirland
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 Will Arnold is working up a sweat as he twists and turns a Rubik's Cube - with his toes. A birth defect left him with limited use of his arms. But that hasn't stopped him from joining 40 other competitors who've converged on Caltech's Winnett Student Center this balmy afternoon for the ultimate nerd showdown: a contest to see who can solve the 1980s fad puzzle in the shortest time.
Watching Arnold's feet is fascinating, but the real star here is 15-year-old Shotaro "Macky" Makisumi, who can arrange the cube's multihued matrix into solid-colored sides faster than anyone else on the planet. His time averages less than 15 seconds, and his personal best is an astonishing 12.1 seconds. "I'll be happy if I come close to that time," he says as the speed cubers assemble. Many believe Macky wiIl become the next Rubik's World Champion this November at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Today's event is merely a warm-up.
Hungarian architect Ernö Rubik invented Rubik's Cube in 1974. He licensed it to Ideal Toy, which introduced the puzzle in the US in 1980. Two years later, competitive speed cubers held the first world championship in Budapest, Hungary. Ideal sold a quarter of a billion units before the craze died a few years later.
At the fad's height, a high school student named Jessica Pridrich quietly invented a way to crack the puzzle in under 20 seconds. The key is memorizing some 100 algorithms. Then, after arranging a cross-shaped pattern on one side of the cube, a player can quickly solve a column at a time by applying the right algorithm. In 1997, Fridrich-by then a professor at Binghamton University - published her method on the Web, where it found an enthusiastic audience. A Hewlett-Packard employee named Dan Gosbee organized a tournament in Toronto in 2003 - the first in 21 years - and the cube's unlikely comeback was on.
Macky uses a variation on Pridrich's system. He began cubing as a child in Yamaguchi, Japan, and moved with his mother to Arcadia, California, four years ago. Gangly and unfailingly polite, he's a freshman at the Polytechnic School, just across the street from Caltech. Macky's teachers say he excels at just about everything-writing, drawing, languages, and arcane number theory. At a school talent show, he once solved the cube with one hand while he juggled balls with the other.
By afternoon, the Winnett lounge is hot and noisy. Macky has won three rounds, but his times are off. He escapes to the outdoor steps to contemplate today's most daunting event: solving the cube blindfolded. The challenge fascinates him. "I've gotten more interested in the mechanism of human knowing," he says. He tries to explain his method, which involves memorizing the scrambled cube beforehand and mentally manipulating the remembered image.
Seated before a table, his eyes not yet covered, Macky lifts his hands from a gray pad, starting a digital clock. He studies the scrambled cube for about half a minute, silently moving his lips, then pulls a white satin blindfold over his eyes. The rotating cube snaps like an angry reptile. Suddenly he freezes. The room goes utterly silent. He appears to be trying to retrace his movements with his long, elegant fingers. After several agonizing seconds, he resumes shuffling and then drops the solved cube on the mat. Time: 2:50.32.
What happened? "I didn't know what direction the corner should go," he says. "So I guessed."
Macky's friend Leyan Lo, a Caltech sophomore, is next. When he drops the cube and removes the blindfold, he stares at the clock in astonishment: 2:41.54. He's won - and set a world record. Lo appears pained and embarrassed. "Macky taught me how to do this," he says quietly.
Macky is not upset. He's focused on the world championship this fall. Besides, he's not the type who chews the rug when things go wrong. "It's not that I want to be the fastest," he says. "It's the idea of mastering something to the extent that you can do it mindlessly. Complete execution."
Source: Wired Magazine
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