Dec 29, 2007

Local Rubik's whiz helms 'speed cuber' club

UC-Berkeley student can complete puzzle using just one hand in 17.9 seconds

By Matt Krupnick / MediaNews

At some point, the colors started to blur.

What had been a colorful Rubik's Cube became a whirring, twirling, clicking razzle-dazzle in Dan Dzoan's hand. And yes, that's singular.

Dzoan, one of the world's foremost "speed cubers," has helped build UC-Berkeley into a cubing powerhouse.

The fastest Dzoan has sorted the 54 jumbled, colored squares into single-colored sides? A mind-blowing 10.08 seconds, but that was with two hands, practically child's play in the world of speed cubing.

Using just one hand, the 23-year-old mechanical engineer blazed through the puzzle in 17.9 seconds at a San Francisco competition last January, setting a world record that was broken five months later ... by his brother, a UC Irvine student. His younger sister, a high-school student, holds a world record for female cubers.

Dzoan, a 23-year-old Fremont native, has come a long way from his days as a child when he was proud to solve one side in less than a minute.

"My dad said, 'You know, your uncles can do the whole thing in under a minute,'" Dzoan said during an interview on the Berkeley campus as other members of the university Rubik's Cube club zipped through the puzzle again and again around him. "I said, 'No way.' And here I am."

He's wasn't alone at UC-Berkeley, from which he graduated in December. The cubing club has attracted at least two dozen members since it was founded in 2006, and campus tournaments have brought in up to 85 competitors.

The club's growth is due in large part to Dzoan, who discovered a slew of Rubik's Cube fans in his dormitory a couple of years ago. Soon, he and other advanced cubers were holding speed-cubing classes on campus.

But the skill of spinning the cube's sides at blazing speeds has paid off the most for Dzoan. He recently traveled to Ireland to promote a new energy drink, and he appeared at a Las Vegas trade show this year.

In October, Dzoan placed third at the world championships in Hungary, although he noted that he would have finished second if nerves hadn't led to several time penalties.

With videos of his one-handed prowess readily available on sites such as YouTube, he said he felt like a celebrity in Budapest.

"I don't think of myself as one," he said. "But everyone looked at my name tag and said, 'Oh, oh. Dan, hi.' It was kind of odd."

Dzoan said anybody can learn to solve the cube, but it's clear the activity primarily appeals to more organized left-brainers. UC Berkeley's main rival is the California Institute of Technology, and the Berkeley club's most enthusiastic participants are math, science and engineering majors.

Competitors give explanations of why it's "easy" to solve a Rubik's Cube - which has 43 quintillion configurations - that are, perhaps, not so easy.

"I learned some algorithms and got down to an average of 35 seconds," said Connie Chen, an 18-year-old biology major from San Jose. A few new "finger tricks" also helped, she said.

Dzoan said he focuses on lining up colors on the cube's edges before worrying about the rest of the puzzle.

"The way I solve a Rubik's Cube is the same way every time," he said. "I just look for patterns. It's second nature now."

And that's the key, said Richard Ivry, a UC-Berkeley psychology professor and brain expert. While cubers may not consider themselves athletes, they are showing some of the same skills as top athletes like Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali, he said.

Speed cubing "has less to do with hand control than it does with pattern recognition," said Ivry, who uses cubing during his lectures on coordination. "As soon as (Dzoan) sees a cube, he knows which patterns to look for."