A six-year-old in Chengdu broke the girls' Rubik's Cube record twice in three days
Lian Yunzhi averaged 4.52 seconds at a competition in Wuhan. Three days later, in Guangzhou, she averaged 4.27. That made her the first girl to average under four and a half seconds. She has learned more than thirteen hundred algorithms, practising two or three hours a day.
24 September 2026
Photo: Ivo Kruusamägi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A six-year-old from Chengdu has broken the girls' world record for solving a Rubik's Cube twice in three days, China's state broadcaster CCTV reported on Monday, and the second of the two runs made her the first female speedcuber to average under four and a half seconds.
Lian Yunzhi, who is called Zhizhi at home, averaged 4.52 seconds at a World Cube Association competition in Wuhan, and then at a second competition in Guangzhou she brought that down to 4.27, according to the CCTV report, which was carried by AFP and published in Hong Kong by The Standard on 22 September.
What an average is
A speedcubing result is not one solve, because a competitor in a round at a World Cube Association event is handed five scrambled cubes in turn, the fastest and the slowest of the five times are thrown out, and the middle three are averaged, and it is that averaged number rather than any single solve that goes into the record books.
The format is built to make luck expensive, since a competitor who draws one merciful scramble and four awkward ones will not score well on it, the single good time being the first thing the calculation throws away, which is why an average under four and a half seconds is a harder thing to produce than one fast solve.
Photo: Radhika41, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Thirteen hundred algorithms
Lian has learned more than 1,300 solving algorithms, which are memorised sequences of turns that move one particular set of pieces into place without disturbing the pieces already finished, and she has been practising two or three hours a day over the past year, according to the BBC's account of the same CCTV report.
She was introduced to the cube after being enrolled in a class, one of several extracurricular activities she had been signed up for, The Standard reported, and the thirteen hundred algorithms came after that, in a year of two and three hour days.
Thirty-one competitions
Her World Cube Association page, under the competitor identifier 2025LIAN01, lists thirty-one competitions and gives her first registered result as 8 February 2025, which puts her entire competitive career so far at about nineteen months.
The women's and girls' figures are tracked separately from the open records, which anyone may enter, and it was the female average that fell in Wuhan and then again in Guangzhou, leaving Lian as the first female speedcuber to average under four and a half seconds, in CCTV's description of the result.
Photo: Alessandro Di Pretoro, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The video
In the footage CCTV published on Monday she is wearing a red gingham bow in her hair, and her hands are small enough that the cube sits high in them while she turns it. When the last face comes good she puts the cube down on the table in front of her, claps once, and pumps her fist.
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