EVERYONE has their obsessions, and for local man Sebastian Krueger it’s the Rubik’s Cube.
“It’s a bit of an addiction, some people smoke – I solve Rubik’s Cubes,” says 29 year-old Krueger.
He is competing at the 2010 Rubik’s New Zealand Speed-Cubing Championships at Te Papa this weekend.
Krueger is fastest solve time is around 35 seconds, a wee way off visiting world record holder Feliks Zemdegs, time of 9.21 seconds.
The world record for solving a 3x3 Rubik’s cube is around 7 seconds, and Krueger says this world record time was set from a “lucky scramble”.
“At competitions there is an official scrambling of the cube, set to algorithms, before they present the cube on the solving table. You then look at it for 15 seconds before solving it.”
2010 is the 30th anniversary of the Rubik’s Cube, which has sold over 350 million units since 1980.
The traditional 3x3 Cube has 43 quintillion (43,000,000,000,000,000,000) possible configurations, and only one solution.
Krueger, a software developer, practices solving the cube on his 45 minute bus ride into the city from Johnsonville.
“I practice daily, it just fits into my day because it’s automatic and takes my mind off things,” he says.
His wife is not so enthusiastic about the meditative qualities of the cube.
“She finds it terrible; to her it’s this loud scratchy noise she has to deal with. But it’s not that bad,” Krueger laughs.
He took up cubing three years ago when he picked up a Rubik’s at his friends.
“I was intrigued at how it was done, and the first time I solved it was quite an event. Then I got the itch to get better and better.”
He says once the cube is solved, the only challenge is to get faster.
New Zealand Speed-Cubing Championships, Te Papa, July 10