The official record for the past two decades, according to Guinness World Records, is 22.95 seconds and was set at the only previous world championships, held in Budapest in 1982. Camann, like everyone else, expects that to be bettered considerably this weekend. There are sideshow attractions — blindfolded cubing, barefoot cubing — but the qualifying round for the prestige event, the 3x3x3 speed-cubing, is drawing to a close, and Camann, who managed times around the 20-second mark, is one of 32 competitors who have qualified for the semifinal, placing ninth.

I found a very interesting Web site (www.lar5.com) by a guy named Lars Petrus, about speed cubing — these guys who get together and try to solve the cube as fast as they can.

The original puzzle is also trivial to solve using the two opposite side theory. If you can get all the corners, you can get two opposite sides by filling in the edges on the two sides, and then all you need is an operation to flip two edges. This is the method used in Speed-Cubing (less than 30 sec. for regular 3x3x3, around 3 minutes for 4x4x4).