When I read about the Pidden brothers and their record-breaking robot, my reaction was equal parts awe and competitive instinct. As a cuber myself, I’ve spent more hours than I care to count staring down a scrambled 4×4 and I’ve cracked the 45-second mark on it multiple times. So when I learned that the new robot world record for the 4×4 is 45.3 seconds, I felt a complicated kind of pride. It’s fast but still very far.
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Matthew and Thomas Pidden, two brothers from the UK, have just earned a Guinness World Record after their robot, nicknamed “The Revenger,” solved a 4×4×4 Rubik’s Cube – also known as Rubik’s Revenge – in 45.305 seconds. That shattered the previous robot record of 1 minute 18 seconds, which had gathered dust for over a decade since 2014. The margin of victory is a massive 33 seconds.
The project began as Matthew’s undergraduate dissertation at the University of Bristol. A 22-year-old computer science student, he spotted the aging record and saw an opening. His brother Thomas, a product designer, jumped in to help build the physical components, many of them 3D-printed. Matthew handled the brains: dual webcams to scan the cube, algorithms to chart the solving sequence, and a four-armed mechanism to execute each twist with precision. The whole thing was built from scratch in just 15 weeks.
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The robot is built around a central frame that locks the cube in place. Four mechanical arms surround it, each capable of rotating different layers independently. Once the cameras scan the cube’s scrambled state, the algorithm computes the most efficient solution and the arms get to work with no hesitation or second-guessing. Just a rapid, calculated sequence of moves until every piece is aligned. It sounds simple. Anyone who’s held a 4×4 knows there are nuances to it.
As a fellow cuber, I find it thrilling that the 4×4 is still very much a human-dominated event. The current human world record stands at 15.18 seconds, set by Poland’s Tymon Kolasiński at the Spanish Championship 2025 in Tarragona in December 2025 – nearly three times faster than The Revenger. Humans aren’t just competitive on the 4×4; they’re miles ahead.
This stands in sharp contrast to the 3×3, where robots have left us in the dust. The machine record there is 0.103 seconds, a blur no human hand could ever replicate. The 3×3 robot battle is over. The 4×4? Robots are still chasing us.
Part of the reason comes down to mechanical complexity. On a 3×3, you can fix the rotational axis on six fixed points and turn each face at maximum speed. The 4×4 has no central stationary point, meaning the robot must recalculate how to hold the cube, position the correct clamps, and release others, which is a much harder engineering problem.
Matthew himself seems aware that The Revenger is only the beginning. Built on a tight budget in 15 weeks, he is convinced the record can be beaten and hopes other students will take up the challenge.
As a cuber who has gone sub-40 on the 4×4 with nothing but fingers and muscle memory, that spirit feels familiar. Every personal best feels like a ceiling until you break it. The Pidden brothers just raised the bar for what a robot can do.
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