Speedcubing competitions require extraordinary fine motor dexterity, rapid visual spatial calculation, and immediate mental recall. Lian Yunzhi, a six-year-old girl from Chengdu in China’s southwestern Sichuan province, has delivered those skills at an unprecedented competitive level.
Over a single weekend, Lian broke the women’s world record for solving a standard three-by-three Rubik’s Cube twice in three days. Competing across World Cube Association certified tournaments in Wuhan and Guangzhou, she posted consecutive five-solve competitive averages of 4.52 seconds and 4.27 seconds.
State broadcaster CCTV confirmed that the performance establishes her as the first female competitor in speedcubing history to record an official competition average below 4.5 seconds.
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Tournament video footage showed the young competitor wearing a red gingham hair ribbon, manipulating the plastic puzzle with rapid finger movements before slapping the electronic timer pads and pumping her fists in celebration.
Moving Beyond Simple Memorisation
Known to her family as Zhizhi, Lian encountered the puzzle when her mother enrolled her in a beginner cubing workshop alongside ballet and music lessons.
Her mother, Lin Yangxi, observed that mechanical puzzle solving sharpened her daughter’s cognitive habits faster than other leisure activities.
Lin explained that she “gradually realized” that cubing served as an “excellent activity for fostering a child’s comprehensive abilities,” prompting the family to support her training regimen.
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The child now practices between two and three hours every day, having memorised and applied more than 1,300 distinct solving algorithms to recognise patterns instantly under tournament conditions.
Her mother emphasised that high-level cubing requires strategic flexibility rather than passive formula recall.
“Solving a Rubik’s Cube improves focus, memory, logical thinking, spatial awareness, and helps develop a healthy mindset toward winning and losing,” Lin stated. “It’s not about blindly memorizing formulas, but using logical reasoning to find optimal solutions.”
With rows of competition trophies already filling display shelves in her Chengdu home, Lian’s double-record weekend places her among the elite ranks of international speedcubing before she has even completed early primary school.
Six-year-old Lian Yunzhi has set a new women’s world record for solving a 3×3 Rubik’s Cube, averaging 4.27 seconds. 🧩🇨🇳 pic.twitter.com/4T7et533bm
— Resonate Voices (@ResonateVoices) September 27, 2026
