Lego Cubestormer robot solves Rubik's Cube in less time than it takes to read this headline

Until yesterday, the world record for fastest time in solving a Rubik's Cube was 5.27 seconds, which was set in the fall of 2011 by a Lego robot named Cubestormer 2. Thanks to the machine's successor (aptly named Cubestormer 3), the time to beat is now 3.253 seconds. The robot, which is the third in a series of automatons designed solely for the purpose of solving the Rubik's Cube ASAP, is powered by an octa-core Samsung Galaxy S4; it's got four high-performance ARM Cortex-A15 cores and four lower-intensity Cortex-A7 cores running the show, each one managing its own Lego Mindstorms actuator.

Essentially, the phone is responsible for analyzing how the cube is arranged, outlining the steps necessary to solve it, and then instructing the robot what to do. We can't help but wonder how different the end result would be if a high-end Snapdragon, Intel, NVIDIA or Apple chipset had been used, but we'll leave it up to the brilliant minds of designers David Gilday and Mike Dobson to tackle that challenge with the Cubestormer 4 when the time is right. And in case you want a reference point as you watch the video below, the fastest human time is 5.55 seconds. (We'd be happy if we could solve it in less than 10 minutes.)