The numbers

The 3×3, in numbers

Everything countable about the 3×3: the mathematics of the puzzle with its sources, and the live state of the sport, rebuilt nightly.

A 3×3 has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 positions (43.25 quintillion). Visiting one per second would take about 1.4 trillion years, roughly a hundred times the age of the universe. cube20.org
God's Number is 20. God's Number answers a simple question: what is the worst case for a perfect solver? However scrambled the cube, a shortest possible solution never needs more than 20 moves. That was proven in 2010 by Rokicki, Kociemba, Davidson and Dethridge, using about 35 CPU-years of computing donated by Google. cube20.org
From 2 January 2027, four of the five Platonic solids have an official event: tetrahedron (Pyraminx), cube (3×3), octahedron (FTO), dodecahedron (Megaminx). The icosahedron is still waiting. WCA announcement, June 2026
The world record single is 2.76 by Teodor Zajder, standing 211 days.
The world record average is 3.51 by Yiheng Wang (王艺衡), standing 81 days.
9,055,677 completed solves are on the official record in 3×3, from 15,271 competitions in 166 countries.
284,439 people hold an official ranking. The median personal best among all of them is 23.84.
3 people have ever gone under 3.00 seconds.
The world record has moved 36 times since records began in 1982.
166 countries hold a national record, and the spread is wide: the fastest is 2.76, the most beatable 1:15.50.
Competitor pages state solve-to-solve consistency as the coefficient of variation: the standard deviation of a round's completed solves divided by their mean, taken per average, with the career figure the median round. Across the 35,811 competitors with ten or more counted rounds, the middle half of the field sits between 12% and 14%.
Results begin in 1982; every figure on this page recomputes nightly from the official export.

Single record lineage → · Average record lineage → · All events →