Daniel Sheppard (Cubitt, 2007) finished third recently in a competition for solving 10 Rubik’s cubes in one hour while blindfolded.
He competed against more than 200 people from 26 nations in the European Rubik’s Cube Championship in Budapest, winning 100 euros and beating his own British record at the same time.
His event, the Rubik’s cube multiple blindfolded, saw competitors nominating the number of cubes they would attempt to solve in the time limit, memorising them and then putting on a blindfold to solve them. “It’s difficult to explain how I work it out,” he said. “I use a lot of coding and decoding. I code the pieces into letters and make stories in my head, and once I’ve memorised the stories I can solve it. You already know how fast you are so you can judge how many you can do in the hour. I went for 11 cubes and at the end I had solved 10. The winner got 11 out of 11 so it was all very close.”
Daniel first realised his talent for the puzzle when he was doing his A-levels at Cranleigh; he then studied Maths at Oxford. He holds national records in six events, including three blindfold competitions and the Fewest Moves challenge. He is ranked seventh in the world for the 5x5x5 cube blindfold event. A normal 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube takes him about 15 seconds to solve; his fastest ever time for one cube was 9.66 seconds.
He also took second prize in Budapest for the Rubik’s Clock challenge, a puzzle similar to the cube involving moving the hands of 18 clock faces to point to 12 o’clock.