By Rachel Shafer

ME senior Dan Dzoan cubes while walking to class, talking with friends or after meals in the dining commons. He does it with one hand and is working on doing it blindfolded. He holds the cube familiarly, fingers flying as he turns the tiles with a soft crunching sound. First a green side emerges, then a yellow, then, in a flash, it’s done.

Dzoan solved a 3x3x3 cube one handed in 17.9 seconds last January at the CalTech Winter Rubik’s Cube Tournament, setting a then–world record time for speedcubing. Not bad for someone who learned to solve the puzzle only two years ago.

“I find it kind of fun,” he says, casually scrambling the cube again.

When Rubik’s Cube mania hit in the early 1980s, Dzoan hadn’t been born yet. He had a cube growing up, but it didn’t become what he calls his “strange obsession” until, as a junior, he transferred to Berkeley and met floormate and EECS major Ryan Zheng. Zheng had taught himself to solve the cube in less than 40 seconds, and his cubing was infectious. Soon, nearly the entire residence hall floor was cubing, racing each other to faster times.

Dzoan began practicing up to three hours a day and adopted the Fridrich method, a popular speedcubing solution credited with the recent resurgence in competitive cubing. Using the Fridrich, a puzzler must memorize 50 algorithms for solving the cube in four efficient steps. His secret, says Dzoan, is not blind memorization, but understanding why and how each step works until it becomes a matter of pattern recognition. Within three months he was producing solutions in less than 30 seconds. He entered his first tournament shortly afterward.

“What I like about the Rubik’s Cube is that, for being a puzzle with one solution, there are so many ways to solve it,” he says. A normal 3x3x3 cube has more than 42 quintrillion possible positions.

See Dzoan conquer the cube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnFP1vA2m1k.