A group of students at Purdue ECE's engineering department have shattered the world record for the fastest time for a robot to solve a 3x3 cube.

Their time of 0.103 seconds is almost 3 times faster than the previous record held by Mitsibushi, a multi-national company. The students comment on how they are limited by the literal cube itself as the regular cube mechanism simply cannot cope with turning so fast, they were able to reinforce the core of the cube used to ensure it didn't fall apart.

The students are determined to push the limits below the 0.1 second threshold.

Every cube can be solved in 20 moves or less and we can assume the computer was able to calculate the optimal solution to the scramble (there are many programs that can do this now), so the challenge was to engineer parts that were able to make precise turns of the correct side of the cube in 0.005 seconds each time and ensure the cubes were robust enough to tolerate such a turn speed. For reference, the human record is 3.05 seconds.