A Kingsbury Green Academy pupil has proved he has fingers of fire competing in an international Rubik’s Cube competition.
Year 12 student Ed has honed his skills in a variety of different Rubik’s Cube puzzles and went head-to-head with top players from across the world, achieving a coveted final eighth place in the Rubik’s Clock competition at the Rubik’s WCA European Championship 2022 in Cophenhagen.
Ed explained, “We have always had Rubik’s Cubes lying around at home and one day in 2019 I decided I wanted to learn how to do it. I taught myself how to do it by watching methods on YouTube and with practice I managed to cut down the time it took me to solve it from 10 minutes to around two minutes.
“I then came across Rubik’s Cube competitions and decided to learn a new method to be able to compete. Solving Rubik’s Cubes is actually quite simple and is based around four steps, but it takes a lot of learning to be able to do it and remember all the different algorithms you use to solve it. It’s definitely a memory skill and I now use about 100 algorithms that I’ve memorised. I’ve managed to lower my average time to 12 seconds, but my best is seven seconds.”
During the European Championships, Ed competed in five different Rubik’s puzzle competitions; the iconic 3×3, the 2×2, pyramid, skewd and Rubik’s clock.
Ed’s main event is the Rubik’s Clock, a two-sided puzzle with nine clock faces. By using four wheels at each corner of the puzzle, competitors need to move all the clocks to 12 o’clock. There are a total of 1,283,918,464,548,864 possible combinations for the clock faces. Ed competed against 400 others in the Rubik’s Clock competition, finally taking eighth place with an impressive top speed of 5.06 seconds.
“It was overall a very good experience, even though I didn’t beat my personal best,” he added. “I’ve been competing locally too, including the World Cube Association Chippenham Autumn 2022 competition. I would like to get to the World Championships, but for that I need to improve and get below a certain time to qualify. The next one is in Korea, and it would be great to be sponsored and be able to compete.”
Principal of Kingsbury Green Academy, Jason Tudor, commented “Competing on an international scale is a wonderful achievement for Ed and the cubing world has a determined challenger in Ed.
“Activities like the Rubik’s Cube can have real advantages to helping pupils succeed in school by teaching them new and different ways of learning and retaining information, as well as giving them much needed fun and relief on breaks from studying and school.”