Tokyo
CNN
—
Japanese toymaker MegaHouse has unveiled a miniature Rubik’s Cube — one so tiny that you might need a pair of tweezers to solve it.
Each face of the cube, which is made from aluminum, measures about five millimeters (around 0.2 inches) across. It was made available for pre-order on the manufacturer’s website on Thursday, with deliveries expected next April.
“The 5-milimeter Rubik’s Cube is the result of the trinity of machines, cutting tools, and players’ passion,” said Kiyokazu Saito, president of Iriso Precision, the company brought in for the precision cutting, in a promotional video on the toymaker’s website.
Weighing just 0.3 grams (about 0.01 ounces), the puzzle is about a 1,000th of the size of the original, which measures around 2.2 inches across each face. And each side of the nine squares on the device’s six faces measures just 1.6 millimeters (around 0.06 inches).
MegaHouse told CNN that the company started conceptualizing it four years ago and began the process to produce it in 2022.
Guinness World Record confirmed the micro-cube as the world’s smallest rotating puzzle cube in August.
The miniature model breaks the record set by British puzzle designer Tony Fisher in 2016, when he startled fans with a 5.6-milimeter version.
But the price tag suggests it’s likely to be a collector’s item rather than the kind of cube that players fiddle with on the go.
They are being sold at 777,777 yen ($5,320), and each comes with a stand declaring it the “World’s record smallest Rubik’s Cube.”
The release coincides with the 50th anniversary of the rotating puzzle, which counts amateur hobbyists and professional mathematicians among its huge following. Over 500 million cubes have been sold since Hungarian inventor Ernő Rubik created it in 1974.
Tournaments are held around the world every year with participants vying for the title of fastest puzzle-solver over fractions of a second.
The current record-holder for a standard 3x3x3 cube is 22-year-old Korean American Max Park, who solved the Rubik’s Cube in 3.13 seconds at a competition in Long Beach, California last year, followed by 10-year-old Wang Yiheng from China, who achieved his personal best of 3.38 seconds at a competition in his home country in August, according to the World Cube Association.
The standard 3x3x3 category, one of the most competitive in the Rubik’s Cube community, is currently dominated by the two countries, with the US’s Luke Garrett and Aaron Huynh coming third and fourth, respectively, and China’s Du Yusheng ranked fifth.
