Six-year-old Chinese girl Cao Qixian has become the first female to solve the Rubik’s Cube in under six seconds.
She completed the feat at the Rubik’s Cube International Open in Singapore with a time of 5.97 seconds for solving the 3x3x3 Cube.
From east China’s Jiangsu Province, Qixian first started to learn how to solve the puzzle when she was three years old. Her parents even got her a coach to continue practicing the skill.
“It was beyond my wildest expectations that she set the world record at such a young age,” her mother said following the tournament.
“Truthfully, I felt like we were living in a dream for a couple of days after returning home.”
Qixian’s coach, Wang Yinhao called her a “gifted speed cuber” and said he’s “happy for her”.
Qixian, herself, said she enjoys speed cubing and has “been practicing two to three hours a day every day”.
First hitting stores in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, the Rubik’s Cube was invented by Hungarian architect Ernő Rubik.
The mental sport has been growing steadily since then and the speedcubing community is now global, with over a dozen different competitions held around the world on any given weekend.
While Qixian’s age of six-years-old is still an outlier, a senior delegate for the United States and Canada at the World Cube Association Matthew Dickman spoke to NPR earlier this year to say that “the competition skews younger than it did 10 years ago”.
“Today, most registrants are around 12 to 15 years old.”
“They’re getting faster, too,” he said, adding that “contestants often edge out others within a miniscule .05 seconds.”
Other cubers have gotten creative with the puzzle by solving Rubik’s Cube with additional challenges– doing it underwater, blindfolded, on unicycles, while hula hooping and juggling.