Cube dudes

Next year, the Rubik's Cube turns 50 years old. The puzzle game has remained popular since Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik invented it in 1974.  As of March 2021, over 450 million cubes had been sold worldwide, according to Wikipedia.

The Rubik's Cube spawned many versions. Communities of fans grew, and competitions abounded for the fastest solver of the puzzle that added to the lexicon the term speedcuber or a contestant in such contests.

This year, an American and an Australian set world records in speedcubing.

On 11 June Max Park, 21, of Cerritos, California, won the World Cube Association tournament in Long Beach, California. His unscrambling time of 3.13 seconds would be hard to beat.

Park's Guinness World Record is the product of years of playing with the cube. Making the fete special is the fact that Park has autism. He started at ten years old to improve his motor skills.

He also won the World Rubik's Cube Championship in 2017 and the Red Bull Rubik's Cube World Cup in 2021.

It may be impossible to beat Park's speedcubing time, but speedcubers set their own marks in many other ways. They can unscramble a cube blindfolded or while doing other things like free falling from the sky.

Sam Sieracki, 17, of West Australia, has solved a cube in 6.5 seconds. That time couldn't beat Park's record, so he tried another way to beat the Guinness Record time of Nitin Subramanian of the United States.

Sieracki trained in Jurien Bay every school holiday and did four tries to beat Subramanian's time of 30.14 seconds.

The Australian teen recently jumped out of an airplane at 14,000 feet over Jurien Bay, his fifth attempt to break the record, and solved a rotating puzzle cube in 28.25 seconds while free falling at around 200 kilometers an hour, ABC reported.

Sieracki admitted that it's a lot harder to concentrate while airborne than on the ground.

"It's really intense. It's very loud because you've got all that wind in your face," he said, according to ABC.

The dude joins an elite group of skydiving speedcubers on the GWR, including Indian Chinmay Prabhu, who solved a rotating tetrahedron puzzle — a triangular pyramid — in free fall at 24.22 seconds. WJG @tribunephl_wjg