Six-year-old breaks women's world Rubik's Cube record [video]

For her, it's all downhill from here. Which is a good thing, because going downhill is fun and easy!

something is wrong with that category when a six year old wins

• flippingheck · 2 hours ago

  When the category is playing with cubes, I'm not so sure?

  • phatfish · 1 hour ago

    She is supposed to be mindlessly scrolling TikTok/Instagram (or Chinese equivalent) by 6, not developing an attention span and problem solving!

    • jabron · 24 minutes ago

      4 seconds of attention is not particularly impressive!

• brianyu8 · 2 hours ago

  or, something is very cool when someone unexpected excels at something :)

• MarcScott · 2 hours ago

  There's something wrong with symphony writing when an eight year old can do it.

She trains for 2 hours a day. Average of 3 is under 4.5 seconds.

Poor little soul.

I'm a bit curious about the rationale behind splitting the category by gender for rubik's cube. Is there a difference in dexterity to justify it? Sound about as useful as splitting rubik's cube champion by weight class. Video looks impressive, though the resources poured into that training seems excessive to me. Maybe I'm too poor and don't understand how rich people raise their kids?

• MarcScott · 2 hours ago

  It's probably more about encouraging participation in the event amongst women. There's probably a hundred male competitive cubers for every female cuber. Having it segregated means that stories like this find their way onto the front page of HN.

  • figassis · 52 minutes ago

    I get it, but if women feel discouraged in a sport they're perfectly qualified for and not disadvantaged in the least, creating a category jus tto accomodate anxiety or lack of interest is actually discrimination no? Shouldn't the work of incentivising more women be outside of the tournament and not bend the tournament altogether?

    • agos · 5 minutes ago

      that's a debate as old as affirmative action policies, which have existed since a long time. Calling them "actually discrimination" is a bit reductive

• _ink_ · 2 hours ago

  I was surprised, too, and looked it up. WCA officially doesn't differentiate. The human World Record is 3.51 currently held by a Yiheng Wang (male). So there is quite a gap to the new record by Lian Yunzh. But if she continues like that, I think we will find out soon whether there are any biologic reasons for the gap or if it is just because there are many more males into that kind of thing.

  • ErroneousBosh · 1 hour ago

    > or if it is just because there are many more males into that kind of thing. Women "trail behind" men in things like speedcubing, e-sports and so on, and I've always felt that it's simply because they've got better things to do with their time.

    • _ink_ · 12 minutes ago

      That feels unnecessary judgemental. If you enjoy a thing, I think that's a great way to spent your time.

  • Randomno · 51 minutes ago

    There's a big gap between the top 2 solvers (Yiheng Wang and Xuanyi Geng) and everyone right now. Yunzhi Lian is 4th in the world.

• madaxe_again · 1 hour ago

  I mean, chess makes the same supposition, that women need a separate league. There are arguments that it promotes equality, that it’s more fair… but I think the reality is closer to “it would be embarrassing for a man to be beaten by a woman”.

  • jabron · 25 minutes ago

    The Chess world championship has an Open section and a Women's section. The Open section is open to every gender. But it's a fair assumption considering how Kasparov treated Polgar.

• voidUpdate · 1 hour ago

  I would be interested to see a leaderboard comparison between male and female cubers. As far as I know, there should be no real biological advantage either way

• 0-_-0 · 31 minutes ago

  How about chess?

So happy to see that she is still 100% kid, but with superpowers that surprise her, first, I might add, because she is just fast like that. As a (past) cuber myself, but generaly into almost any competitive hand eye cordination thing, it would be fun to introduce her to the full varity of targeting, thrown or shot , and similar sports, and more practical things like useing hand tools, very, very precisely. The down side is that bieng better can often be a liability and also teaching her to recognise the ones who get viscious passive/agressive and will then seek to undermine, cheat, trick, trap, and betray, because thats what THEY are good at.

When the differences are in the one tens and one hundreds of a second, isn't the initial configuration a huge factor? How do they prepare the start for a competition like this? Can't just be a random scramble, right?