Jimmy Kingston can learn new skills. On the one hand, he is diving into the world of dark-matter research, but when he’s not working on that, he has a passion for a 3x3x3 cube that can unlock his ingenuity in solving some of the most difficult scrambles.

Kingston is a master in solving the Rubik’s Cube, the 3D combination puzzle that was developed in 1974, 21 years before he was born.

Much like the early 20th-century avant-garde cubist art movement in which subjects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstract form so the subject is depicted from multiple perspectives, the Rubik’s Cube has many solutions.

In a Rubik’s Cube, an internal pivot mechanism enables each of six faces to turn independently, thus mixing up the colors. For the puzzle to be solved, each face must be returned to have only one color. It has various numbers of sides, dimensions and mechanisms.

Although the Rubik’s Cube reached its height of mainstream popularity in the 1980s, it is still widely known and used by many to this day. Kingston is one of those people, specifically calling himself a speedcuber for achieving fast-paced solutions.

He really had two starts to cubing. As an undergrad at UC Berkeley, he and a group of three other friends would play Dungeons and Dragons. In between turns, two friends would be solving their cubes. At one point, his friend loaned him a cube to solve for himself. He went online and learned how to solve it and wound up playing around with it too, until 2017.

Fast forward to 2022: he was visiting his mother in Southern California, and she found a Rubik’s Cube from the 1990s that she had lying around. She asked Kingston to solve it for her.

“I think she remembered I would play with it as an undergrad, but at this point I had no clue how to solve it,” Kingston said. “I told myself ‘I don’t know what to do with it’. I told her I would come back in a few months and have it solved.”

The worldwide association of cubing

Not remembering how to solve it, Kingston again went online and watched a tutorial. But he learned something new about the Rubik’s Cube world that he never knew when he first picked it up.

“I wanted to learn how to do it fast,” he said. “When I was looking all this up online, I found out that apparently there’s a whole world of cubing out there.”

In fact, the World Cube Association (WCA) is the worldwide nonprofit organization that regulates and holds competitions for mechanical puzzles that are operated by twisting groups of pieces, commonly known as twisty puzzles (a subcategory of combination puzzles). The most famous of those puzzles is the Rubik’s Cube. Since the start of the WCA, there have been more than 10,000 competitions.

The goal of the association is to have “more competitions in more countries with more people and more fun, under fair and equal conditions.”

For Kingston, WCA competitions are an environment where he could show off his talent for solving the cube, where he has solved it officially in 17.52 seconds and even solved it blindfolded in 41.90 seconds.

“These are competitions, but they’re also social events,” he said. “It’s where people meet to exchange ideas, including tricks and algorithms and see each other’s progress, and just talk about the sport in general.

“There are a lot of ways to improve. And the competitive aspect of it makes it really fun. It’s a very lively community where people are always getting better. I feel like it draws me to it, so I spend most of my free time practicing to get faster.”

The art of solving the cube

But speedcubing isn’t just about figuring out how to turn the cube. Once you’ve intuitively solved the first two layers, there are sequences of moves called algorithms for swiftly solving the last layer of the cube. Once you’ve memorized those, Kingston said, the rest of the solve is pattern recognition and muscle memory.

Learning all the algorithms for every puzzle isn’t easy. For example, the optimal way to solve the cube blindfolded is a technique called “3-style,” where each scramble requires executing around 10 algorithms back-to-back perfectly from a set of nearly 850 algorithms. Kingston has memorized them all.

I feel like my ability to learn has improved a lot. I can learn new things; it’s never too late.

He uses this analogy to memorize algorithms: say you’re entering a password for a website. Once you start entering the characters, it feels automatic. But if you had to say out loud what your password is, you don’t remember it. But when you start to type it, your fingers know what to do.

“It’s kind of similar for cubing when you learn algorithms for solving the cube,” Kingston said. “If you asked me to tell you the sequence of moves for a certain algorithm, most of the time, I wouldn’t know it. But my fingers do.”

Though learning so many algorithms wasn’t easy, he said he just gave himself some time and was patient. And that talent not only helped his cubing, but also his life.

“I feel like my ability to learn has improved a lot,” he said. “It gave me confidence with work, too. I’m giving myself the time just to be patient with myself and learn new skills. And it’s happening all the time. I feel like I have that mentality in many aspects of my life. I can learn new things; it’s never too late.”