Via The Verge.
If you’re still feeling a little worse for wear after the New Year’s celebrations then we have the perfect slow-paced antidote for you: a seven and a half hour video of the world’s largest Rubik’s Cube being solved. This may sound a little sluggish, but bear in mind that this is a 17x17x17 cube made to order by Oskar van Deventer and offers a total of 6.69 * 10^1054 or 66.9 quinquagintatrecentillion different possible positions. (That’s a 66 with more than a thousand digit after it.) There’s also — as far as we can see — no official record for solving one.
This slice of quiet madness is brought to you by “twisty puzzle” enthusiast Kenneth Brandon, aka RedKB, who informs viewers: “The way you solve a 17 by 17 is just like you would a seven by seven, or a five by five. If you can solve one of those then the 17 by 17 isn’t that hard, but it is very, very tedious.” Brandon says that the best approach is the “reduction method” — solving the centers before moving on to the edges — which took him the full seven and a half hours, spread over five days, to grind through the cube. Once the centers are solved, says Brandon, “it’s like a big Rubik’s Cube, with huge centers, long skinny edges, and tiny corners.” You can watch a six minute overview of the task in the video above or check out the full, unedited video below. “Obviously don’t watch the whole thing,” cautions Brandon.