Speedcubing makes Rubik's Cube from the past cool again

Jul. 9—The Rubik's Cube, once the ubiquitous toy of the 1970s and'80s, has made a fast and furious comeback in recent years, and Hawaii cubers, as competitors are called, have been making their mark.

Usain Bolt—the world's fastest human—set the world record by running 100 meters in 9.58 seconds.

He's got nothing on speedcubers. The best of them routinely solve their scrambled Rubik's Cube in 5 seconds, or even less. What's more, they're spinning, rotating and calculating different moves, called algorithms, as they go. Bolt just had to repeat his stride, step by step.

The Rubik's Cube, once the ubiquitous toy of the 1970s and'80s, has made a fast and furious comeback in recent years, and Hawaii cubers, as competitors are called, have been making their mark. One of the world's top-ranked cubers is Matty Hiroto Inaba, , who's scored under 5 seconds more than a dozen times in competition and won 62 events around the world. He won the Hono Luau Cube Off competition held in Waikiki last September, competing alongside about 50 local youths, most of them first-timers to competition.

"We signed all our kids up for it, " said Yulee Okazaki, co-founder of Hawaii Cubing Community, which promotes cubing and has grown to about 100 members since its launch in the fall. "(Organizers ) said they'd never had that many new speedcubers at a competition."

Travis Dumaran, 13, a student at Punahou School, typifies the attitude of the competitive cuber. He got interested in speedcubing through a friend who could solve it "super fast, about 20 seconds." Travis' best competitive time is now about 9 seconds, and he's taken part in three official competitions, getting two top 3 finishes. (Competitions consist of many different events, from solving typical 3 ×3 cubes, to the more complicated 4 ×4 cubes, or solving them with one hand or blindfolded, with the competitor required to memorize the cube and solve it sightless.)

"When I first solved it, it felt so awesome to be able to solve something I didn't think I'd be able to solve, but after I solved it I just want to keep getting faster and faster, " he said. He described the process of solving the cube as an exercise in focus and concentration, and the ability to instantaneously build on visual clues.

"I'm just completely honed in to it, looking at all the different pieces on it, recognizing the patterns as quick as I can, " he said. "Usually when we see the cube that all messed up, there's usually some part of it that's a bit solved, and then from that we just build on that solved part."

Invented in 1975 by Hungarian architect and artist Erno Rubik, the Rubik's Cube became a rage in the late 1970s and'80s, with manufacturer Ideal Toy reporting sales of 9 million in the early 1980s, according to The Washington Post. A speedcubing tournament was held in Germany about that time. But as with most fads, interest waned, and for about 20 years the Rubik's Cube appeared to be following the same path as the hula hoop, buried by trendier, and perhaps less frustrating games.

In 2004, however, the World Cube Association was established with the stated mission of having "more competitions in more countries with more people and more fun, under fair and equal conditions." It sanctions events around the world and ranks player results, and oversaw the growth in the number of competitions from a few hundred to nearly 1, 500 in the decade prior to the pandemic. The WCA now hopes to have its events televised or streamed in the near future, according to its website.

Locally, speedcubing clubs have sprouted up at a number of schools, said Okazaki, who with friends Sharon Arizala and Wini Lui started the Hawaii Cubing Community, modeled after similar organizations on the mainland. Okazaki's son Jack and Arizala's son, Kyson, took an interest in the puzzle while cooped up at home during the pandemic.

"With COVID, there were a lot of YouTube videos, and they started doing it at home when they're by themselves, " said Okazaki. "We went to a party and I think we saw that our two kids liked doing it, but none of us (parents ) could solve the cube, so we started reaching out to people in the community to see who could solve cubes."

They also contacted Inaba, who held an online demonstration and answered questions. "To them, it was like a celebrity spending time with them, " said Okazaki of the new players.

She said that the kids have now become somewhat like VIPs at their schools, with their classmates gathering around to watch them at recess. "They would hand off the cubes to the fan club and they would scramble it for them and they would solve it, " she said.

Arizala said the cubes themselves have undergone technological changes that make them smoother and therefore faster under expert hands. "It's not like the ones we grew up with, " she said. "There's magnets inside and it's much looser."

Okazaki and Arizala now teach beginners how to solve the cubes, but it was clear from a recent meeting of their group at South Shore Market in Kakaako that youngsters can advance quickly beyond beginner level. Watching them is like a study in concentration, followed by a delicate dance of the fingers.

Players began with a scrambled cube in front of them ; it was covered up so they couldn't see it. At the word "go, " they lifted off the cover and took up to 15 seconds to observe the cube, placing both their hands on a timing device in front of them.

Once they lifted their hands, the timer started, and in an instant, everyone was flipping, twisting and turning the colored pieces of their cube into a desired position. In a little more time than the 15 seconds or so it takes to read this sentence out loud, many had dropped their cubes, their colors uniform on each side to show they were solved, before slapping their hands back on the timer to stop it.

Hannah Murai, a 18-year-old taking a "gap year " before heading off to college to study computer engineering, has used YouTube videos—apps are also available—to help her improve her speed at cubing, which is now at about 13.25 seconds in competition. To hear her describe the process is to enter a sci-fi world, with words and terminology that sound familiar and foreign at the same time.

"I learned the CFOP method, " she said. "It's C for Cross, F for the First Two Layers, O for Orientation of the Last Layer, and then P for Permutation of the Last Layer. So those are like the four steps that you're going through as you're solving. So the first two steps are kind of intuitive, and you just have to practice them, and there are some algorithms you can learn, but then the last two steps ... you have to learn a lot of algorithms for those."

She and her brother KJ have a bit of sibling rivalry going on when it comes to speedcubing—KJ has been faster in competition—but, she said, "it's fun to practice with him, because we do the same scrambles and see who can be faster."

Taitum Tanouye, a 13-year-old student at Kailua Intermediate School, is one of the fastest speedcubers on Oahu, with a competitive best of about 7 seconds. He said there can be a bit of luck involved in achieving a good time.

"It was scrambled in such a way that I could see all the pieces moving together easier, " he said of his competitive best. "So I was able to go full on with my turning and get a really good time. Sometimes you get bad solves, sometimes you get good."

What's best about speedcubing, parents and participants said, is the sense of accomplishment they get from helping each other while also improving themselves.

"They celebrate each other's successes, " Okazaki said. "If somebody gets a personal best, a personal record, everyone's happy."

Dumaran, the Punahou student, said, "One of the best aspects of cubing is to see other people and just share your knowledge of the cube with them, have fun, race each other."