Princeton's 1st Rubik's Cube competition draws crowd

At 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, nearly 100 excited competitors, along with family and friends, packed Richardson Auditorium to the sounds of techno music. For the next nine hours, they participated in Princeton’s first Rubik’s Cube competition.

Shotaro Makisumi ’12, president of the University’s Cube Club, organized the official World Cube Association competition. With a personal best time of 8.5 seconds, Makisumi is currently ranked No. 24 in the World Cube Association’s official Rubik’s Cube rankings.

The competition, which consisted of 12 events, was open to all ages. Contestants included middle school, high school and college students from as far as Boston, though most competitors were 13- and 14-year-olds.

As competitors sat on stage solving Rubik’s Cubes and trying to beat their personal best times, audience members, including participants in other events, manipulated their own cubes, freely discussing strategies and algorithms.

In the 3-by-3 speedsolve, the main event, competitors solved five cubes in three rounds each. Competitors’ average times were computed after dropping their fastest and slowest times, and eight people made it to the final round. The winner of the competition was John Tamanas, a local high school student, and the runner-up was Dan Cohen from Duquesne University. Both said they first picked up the Rubik’s Cube just three years ago.

Only two undergraduates, Makisumi and Alan Chang ’14, competed in the tournament. Makisumi won fifth place in the main 3-by-3 speedsolve event, and Chang won first place in the Fewest Moves competition. Makisumi is a math major, and Chang plans to major in math.

Though the event was a competition, “I thought it was really nice [and] laid-back,” Chang said. He explained that he was scared to mix it up when he first received the cube as a gift. But ever since he first solved it in seventh grade, he “wanted to get faster,” he said.

Alex Bruso, president of the Rubik’s Cube Club at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, described the initial atmosphere as “hectic, but [it’s] friendly competition ... because there’s this online community, too,” where players share solving strategies.

Support nonprofit student journalism. Donate to the ‘Prince.’ Donate now »

Makisumi maintains a website, cubefreak.net, where he posts new algorithms and patterns in “cube theory.” He noted that the website already has roughly 1.5 million views. “The field is still pretty new, so there are lots of low-hanging fruits,” he said, referring to the many opportunities for discovering new patterns and strategies.

One of his biggest contributions to speedsolving was the counterintuitive idea of “going slower and looking ahead,” since people were moving too fast without keeping their next move in mind, he said. “Now, the challenge for me is going fast and [still] looking ahead.” Solving a cube quickly and gracefully is like “playing scales on a musical instrument,” he added.

Though Makisumi spends more time these days on cube theory, he said, he first took up the Rubik’s Cube as a means of “self-improvement in mastering this one object.” He broke the world record for fastest time for a 3-by-3 at the age of 14, after practicing up to two hours a day.

Now he sees the Cube Club, his website and organizing the Princeton Cube Competition as a way of “giving back to the community after seven years of exploring the cube,” he said.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

At the end of the event, most eliminated competitors left for the trip back home, leaving roughly 25 in the auditorium.

Makisumi concluded the event by juggling five clubs — another one of his hobbies — and with a word about the competition that would resonate with any Rubik’s Cube aficionado: “I’m so tired, but I had so much fun.”