WITH the Rubik's Cube, that colourful icon of the 1980s, making a pop-culture comeback, hard-core aficionados are preparing to test their nimble fingers at the first Rubik's Cube Canadian Open tournament.
Anyone who's ever thrashed fruitlessly at a Rubik's Cube may be surprised to learn there are solutions that don't involve peeling off and rearranging the coloured stickers.
In a competitive event known as "speed cubing," contenders develop strategies that allow them to rearrange and solve the plastic puzzles at finger-flying speeds. In fact, the Canadian record for solving the classic 3x3 cube is just 11.15 seconds.
"I was in university and saw somebody solve it and I was just blown away," says Dave Campbell, organizer of the Canadian Open, which takes place May 19 at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. "I had never actually seen somebody solve it in person and I immediately thought, 'This person must be a genius!"'
Campbell was a Rubik's Cube rookie then, but the Georgetown, Ont., resident now holds the Canadian record for one-handed solving of the 3x3 cube, clocking in at 24 seconds. (While the Rubik's Cube is technically three segments in length, width and height, cubers refer to the blocks simply as "3x3s.")
A few years after he saw that "genius" solve a cube, Campbell taught himself to solve one he received as a Christmas gift. He stumbled upon the world of speed cubing when he searched online for tips.
Attending the 2005 world championships in Orlando, Fla., inspired Campbell to start a national competition for Canadian cubers, who enjoy a virtual community, thanks to the Internet, but are otherwise isolated in their hobby.
The winner of the 3x3 event at the Canadian Open will win a trip to the world championships in Budapest in October, Campbell says, and there are cash prizes for other finalists.
Aside from the 3x3 and one-handed events, the competition will feature 4x4 and 5x5 races, as well as the mind-boggling feat of blindfolded cubing, in which participants memorize the configuration of a scrambled cube, don a blindfold and set out to solve the puzzle.
"Your brain hurts," Burnaby, B.C.'s Hong Chen says of blindfolded solving, a challenge he's recently taken up after 26 years of regular cubing. "The other way, even with eight hours (of practice), you will only hurt your fingers, you will not hurt your brain."
When he heads to the Canadian tournament next weekend, he'll be accompanied by a second-generation cuber -- his 16-year-old son, Oscar, who will compete in the 3x3 event. Chen, a software engineer (the challenges of his day job are "nothing compared to cubes," he says), will attempt five different events.
When it comes to explaining how to solve a cube, let alone do so in a few seconds, he's enigmatic.
"This is very hard to explain if you don't know how to solve it," he says. "If you do know how to solve it, it's easy to explain."
The Rubik's Cube was invented by Erno Rubik in 1974, originally designed as a teaching tool for his students at the Hungarian Academy of Crafts and Design in Budapest. The diabolical little puzzle hit the mainstream a few years later and swiftly became the fastest-selling toy of all time, with 100 million Rubik's Cubes flying off shelves between 1980 and 1982.
The toy disappeared briefly from the pop culture map when it went out of production in the late '80s. But, like all things retro, it came back with a vengeance. To date, more than 300 million of the toys have been sold.
Dave Charbonneau, president of Canadian distributor Kroeger Inc., attributes the Rubik's Cube renaissance to some lucky free publicity. Recent commercials for PlayStation and Hyundai featured the cube, he says, and the Will Smith film, The Pursuit of Happyness, further piqued people's interest with a pivotal scene starring a Rubik's Cube.
"This is a toy that originated 27 years ago, and now it's appealing to a whole new generation," he says.
-- CanWest News Service
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