Renton Rubik's Cube Master Sets World Record

Renton's Kevin Hays last weekend set a new world record for the fastest time in completing a 6x6 Rubik's cube.

The 2012 graduate of Liberty High School solved the cube in 1 minute, 40 seconds at the Vancouver Open in Surrey, British Columbia.

According to results from that competition, Hays also took first in the Rubik's Cube and 5X5 Cube competition. The previous week at the World Rubik's Cube Championship in Las Vegas, Hays won the 5X5, 6X6 and 7X7 competitions too. 

Hays said he was first introduced to the Rubik's cube while on a ski trip to Whistler in his freshman year of high school. He and a friend watched as a man completed a cube in 20 seconds. He showed them how he did it, a friendship was formed, they've kept in touch, and Hays continues to update him on his latest accomplishments.

For the first two years of high school, Hays said he always had a cube in hand but realized at one point, "that wasn't the most normal thing to do."

He continued to practice at home, however, and earned his first world record at the U.S. National Championships in 2011, also for the 6X6 cube. That was just after his junior year and college applications commanded some attention soon after, so he stepped back just a bit. 

Hays just completed his freshmen year at Washington University in St. Louis with an intended double major in math and computer science.

“When I started it was a pretty nerdy thing to do,” he told KING 5. "But when I started winning things, people were like, OK."

Does one need to have the intellect of Dr. Spock to be able to master the Rubik's Cube? Not really, he said. "It's pretty much a system. There are lots of tutorials online to teach you different ways to solve it. You don't solve everything at one time - it's piece by piece. If people want to learn, the tutorials online teach you the different methods and algorithms."

Online:
Renton man sets Rubik's Cube world record (KING 5)
Kevin Hays' competition history on World Cube Association