now uh many of us have spent hours
trying to solve one of these you you're
a bit of a whisper
i'm not a wiz at all i used to be able
to do it once upon a time no i'm good
as you can see it's gonna take me a very
long time i i hate them and then i
took the stickers off and just put them
on in the right place because it got so
frustrating
you didn't i did yes did you when i was
when i was a bit younger
they just annoy me anyway um some people
could manage to do it in just
seconds and we used to be working on it
for a minute or so yeah look i've nearly
look i'm getting to the top which
you need to do the top layer you do very
well with your oranges there yeah but
you have to have
these ones right as well do you see what
i mean like that so there is a system
well i had a system but as you can see i
can't remember it and it used to take me
a long time
anyway you've been eyeing it up
throughout the program i'm gonna
re-learn i mean you know what else to do
better to do really
there are some people who are incredibly
good at it each year the best
uh compete at the rubik's cube world cup
uh which
and the sort of variety of challenges
different ways of doing it aren't they
chris mills got to take home the gold
from his event let's have a look at how
he did it
[Music]
all my nerves just went away and i
solved like
incredibly and i managed to get 2-0 and
the best of three
and i was just blown away with my
performance i was extremely happy
uh all my friends were congratulating me
i could hear my parents cheering
downstairs it was good
if you put your mind to it you can
accomplish anything
you see dad if you put your mind to it
you can accomplish anything
not quite in that time well chris joins
us now from copenhagen
and we're joined by callum goodyear as
well the vice chair of the world
cube association um oh sorry uh callum
is in copenhagen
uh chris let's come to you first of all
congratulations
um we saw your celebration there about
managing to
uh work out the rubik's cube in in
record time so give us an idea of how
much work goes into that
i mean i've been doing this for about
six and a half years now and i've
probably
averaged about 50 souls a day so i've
probably put in a good 5 000
hours into practicing this so it's a lot
of work but i love it so it's fine
wow you clearly do and what is your i
mean
for you is the goal just to be as quick
as you can what's the goal
yeah the goal is just to beat my
previous self really i mean obviously
it's nice to be best in the country or
best in the world at some events but
i mean i just like to better myself and
and see how far i can take my speed
how did you get into it in the first
place did someone introduce it to
someone get your rubik's cube for a
birthday or christmas
well uh one of my brother's friends he
came round one one day
back in 2014 and he we have one lying
around which he solved and
it was one of those boring days i had
nothing to do so i thought hey i'll try
and be like my brother's friend and how
to do it as well
um and callum i mean i you know i'm i
was an early adopter in that back in the
day when they were first invented
can you believe they're still going on
after all these years that they're still
really popular
yeah well the world cup association has
basically been seeing
exponential growth in competitive
numbers since 2004.
obviously this year has been a hard hit
for uh holding competitions where we all
have to be in close proximity to each
other
so red bull did a good job of moving
this online
but uh hopefully this uh pandemic with
people locked inside
can get people to learn um yeah you say
learn are there
particular um you know because i learned
a particular way is there just one way
or there are lots of different ways to
solve it
no there's lots of different methods but
as with anything nowadays if you want to
learn
just go to youtube type in how to solve
a rubik's cube there are
many good tutorials to find okay and
i'm sure you're hoping like many other
people that will return to normal
eventually so what is the what is the
world cube association get together the
world cup what's that normally like how
many people get together for that when
when you are able to be in the same room
right so the world uh
cube association uh held their world
championship last year
in melbourne australia and we were just
shy of a thousand competitors which was
quite good considering the distances
most people had to travel to get there
and um chris
you're get i need to know a bit of
specifics about your event so
you won which event and is it where does
that sort of sit
in the rubik's cube um pyramid if you
like
okay so i won the rescramble event which
you basically get two cubes
one of which is already scrambled and
one of which is already solved
and you have to make the solved one look
exactly the same as the scrambled one
so it's kind of like doing it backwards
so
it's it's a unique it's a unique thing
to the
the red bull events that have just
started a few years back and they they
don't hold them at the wca events that
calum helps organize
but yeah so it's quite a unique event
that red bull came up with but
i really enjoy it okay can you have you
prepared it have you prepared a cube for
us you two
yeah i have a scrambled one here okay
let's have a look at the scramble so
take us through talk us through watch
we give you a three two one ready three
two
one go
look at those fingers
oh wow right chris i love that
chris talk me through your method i want
to know your method that was about eight
seconds by the way don't get through the
method he can't talk
about 20 different moves what are you
thinking about while you're doing that
is it just a is it just to learn process
or what
i mean yeah like uh for me now like that
that was all just muscle memory like i
could
i could basically do that in my sleep
but yeah
in the time you've in the time you've
managed to do that shall i show you you
probably can't see it at home but i'm
i'm sort of you know yeah we've got our
inside everywhere i know i don't have an
orange side i've got uh yeah
i've got that and then i'm getting
around this bit
but it's really strange actually what
i'm really i'm genuinely i'm going to go
back and learn how to do this again
because it's really interesting kind of
bringing back the memories of the moves
and thinking oh yeah that needs to go
there because
you know you change one and then the
other one changes but there are ways to
do it which i
can vaguely remember chris what are you
spending the money on by the way i know
you get
you get a share of 20 odd thousand
pounds so what are you spending it on
well i've just booked a flight to new
zealand last night so
a lot of it will be going towards my
trip there really and a new cube maybe
yeah possibly yeah go on son well done
chris lovely to talk to you callum well
done as well
yeah do you want a room do you know how
many have been sold over the years
rubik's cubes
350 million have been sold around the
world first invented in
1974 it was called the magic cube to
start with by
a hungarian uh called erno rubix i
remember it well
hillary i'm going to carry on with that
dan i'm quite excited about it will you
let me know later
whether you managed to do it yeah i'm
going to do that by tomorrow's program
i'm sure