Every elevator in the Myst series, ranked An hour long deep dive into the environment and puzzle design in the Myst series, centered upon its elevators. (Warning: Contains spoilers for all 5 games in the Myst series)
This might be the nerdiest thing I've seen in this fandom in a long long time! I love the little digressions like exactly what counts as an elevator, and the creator's obvious affection for the games.
Word puzzles on LinkedIn. Logic challenges in The Washington Post. For news publishers and tech sites looking to both entice and engage users, games are serious business.
Enlarge/ So much depends upon a red puzzle cube, pinned by servo motors, inside Mitsubishi. (credit: Mitsubishi)
The last time a human set the world record for solving a Rubik's Cube, it was Max Park, at 3.13 seconds for a standard 3×3×3 cube, set in June 2023. It is going to be very difficult for any human to pull off a John Henry-like usurping of the new machine record, which is more than 10 times faster, at 0.305 seconds. That's within the accepted time frame for human eye blinking, which averages out to one-third of a second.
TOKUFASTbot, built by Mitsubishi Electric, can actually pull off a solve in as little as 0.204 seconds on video, but not when Guinness World Records judges were measuring. The previous mechanical record was 0.38 seconds.
Mitsubishi Electric's TOKUFASTbot, solving a Rubik's-like puzzle on May 7, two weeks before judges showed up to verify its world-record speed.
There are a few footnotes and caveats to what would otherwise be an incremental gain and nifty slow-motion video. The first thing is that the world record reported is for "fastest robot to solve a rotating puzzle cube." That intriguingly sidesteps the much better-known "Rubik's Cube" identifier. Rubik's notably lost its trademark on any rotating 3×3×3 cube puzzle game in Europe. Perhaps Mitsubishi and Guinness simply wished to avoid touching a trademark registered to a company with a known litigation history.
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