March 10 (UPI) — A pair of British brothers earned a Guinness World Records title when their robot solved a 4x4x4 Rubik’s Cube in 45.3 seconds.
Matthew and Thomas Pidden, brothers who share a passion for robotics and computing, demonstrated their robot’s puzzle-solving skills at the University of Bristol in May 2025 and it managed to solve a Rubik’s Cube in 45.3 seconds.
Guinness World Records has now confirmed the demonstration broke the record for the fastest robot to solve a 4x4x4 puzzle cube, which was previously set at 1 minute and 18.68 seconds in 2014.
“I decided to break the record as part of my undergraduate final project,” Matthew Pidden told Guinness World Records. “I have always enjoyed Rubik’s Cubes as a child and computer science. Combining the two felt like a natural progression and a great project.”
A video of the demonstration shows the robot using its four arms to manipulate the cube until its sides are all solid colors.
“The robot uses two cameras to scan the cube. Both cameras were blocked by physical sliding plastic shutters. These were removed by hand at the start of each record attempt,” Matthew said. “Using these shutters meant the cameras could not see any faces of the cube before the attempt. The cube was solved entirely by the robot and the software running on the laptop without any external networks.”
The machine successfully broke the record with a time of 53 seconds on its third attempt, but the brothers were convinced it could do better, so they kept going until it achieved a time of 45.3 seconds on its sixth attempt.
