Watch a six-year-old kid do it in 37 seconds
Watch Michel Gondry do it with his feet

Its transformation has been remarkable. Once the pastime of the least popular kid in the playground, Rubik’s cubing is enjoying something of a renaissance.

It might be pushing it to describe cubing as cool, but today you are as likely to find a smart twentysomething university student twisting squares as a nerdy billy-no-mates, while the company that makes it claims sales have increased by 1,000% over the past five years with 250m sold, making it one of the biggest selling toys.

And the reason for this dramatic turnaround for the colourful box of squares that first hit the market in 1980 and fizzled out in a puff of naffness five years later? The web.

“The internet is everything,” says Toby Mao, 18, from California and one of the fastest cubers on the planet, who recently taught Will Smith how to crack the Cube for his role in last year’s The Pursuit of Happyness. “One guy finds a shortcut and passes it on, the next guy gets better and does the same: it’s a community that shares tips because we all want to get faster.”

The trendification of Rubik’s Cube was helped by the creation of the term “speedcubing”, a word aficionados gleefully embraced because it at once degeeked their obsession, giving it a competitive edge and adding that missing element of social interaction. The web provided the ideal environment for cubers to pit themselves against one another.

Nowhere is the competitive cubing more intense than at the annual world championships that take place this week in Budapest – the spiritual home of the Cube and home city to the reclusive Erno Rubik, a sculptor and professor of architecture who invented what he originally called the Magic Cube in 1974.

Starting on Friday, the city will be in the grip of Rubik mania as 300 competitors attempt to beat the world record of 9.86sec set by Frenchman Thibaut Jacquinot at the Spanish open championships in May.

Among the competitors will be Dan Harris, the British champion with a personal best time of 10.44sec. “I probably wouldn’t be going if I hadn’t fallen off my bike five years ago,” says Harris. “I was stuck at home recuperating so I thought I’d give it a go on this old 99p Cube we’d had knocking around the house for years. I managed to figure it out apart from the last few steps, so I looked it up on the internet. It was weird when it finally clicked into place: we’d had the Cube since I was a kid but I’d never seen it finished before.”

There are strict rules governing the competition. For each round a computer comes up with a random, 25-move scramble, which a scrambler (one of the officials) then performs by hand, putting the coloured squares into the starting positions dictated by the computer. All competitors must solve the same scramble each round and an average time is taken over five rounds.

Because of this competition rule, there is some dispute over Jacquinot’s record time, as the fastest one-off time is claimed by Canadian champ Harris Chan, who did it in 4.92sec. “It was incredible,” he says. “So quick that I almost couldn’t remember what I had done.” Most cubers agree that this was a “fluke”.

In addition to the regular Rubik’s Cube (or 3x3x3 as it is known), there are other larger versions to solve at the championships, including the formidable 4x4x4 and 5x5x5. Clearly the more squares there are the more complex it becomes: the world record for the 4x4x4 Cube is 51.16sec, and the world record for the 5x5x5 Cube is 1min, 46 sec. But for many the most fun can be had watching the more novelty events, such as doing the Cube one handed, or with your feet, or even blindfolded.

For anyone who struggled with the Cube on Christmas morning 25 years ago this all sounds like purgatory. But there is an easier way to master it. One of the simplest ways to learn how to crack it is to find the 1980 David Singmaster method online (www.jeays.net/rubiks.htm). It’s not the most efficient way to do it, requiring an average of 100 turns, but it is within anyone’s grasp and is easy to follow because you solve it layer by layer.

Experts use harder-to-learn but ultimately far faster methods, like the Petrus method in which a 2x2x2 section is solved first, followed by 2x2x3 and then incorrect edges are solved using a three-move algorithm. If that’s left you baffled, check out the most popular websites where people chat and compare and post times, including www.speedcubing.com and www.cubestation.co.uk.

What separates dedicated cubers from most other sportsmen – if you’ll allow some leeway with that word’s definition – is the way most choose its social networking opportunities over a craving to be the world’s best.

Sure, they all want to win in Budapest, but most are at pains to express that they have other interests – although the cynical could interpret these claims as the desperate elaborations of nerdy young men who’d rather be seen as “well rounded”. But for many, Budapest is the chance to meet all the other cubing aficionados who form part of their online community.

And while nobody’s expecting Hungary to lay on extra police next weekend, it’s safe to say that even these mild-mannered high achievers will be cutting loose after a hard day’s competition. Scrabble anyone?

Retro specials

he space hopper has been revived and the MySpace generation is familiar with the yo-yo and Pac-Man but there are still a few retro games waiting to come out of the closet.

Swingball
Is the aim to swing the ball to the end of the pole or to hit your opponent?

Guess Who?
The classic guessing game with more silly moustaches than a Chuckle Brothers family reunion

Connect Four
The most fun you can have with a game that ends in a draw

Donkey Kong
Forget about Halo 3 and instead dodge barrels being thrown by an ape

Conkers
You have to wear safety specs and gauntlets these days

The Cube in numbers

1974 Erno Rubik (below right) invents the Cube
100m Number of cubes sold 1980-82
22.95sec Winning time at the first world championship in 1982
9.86sec Current world record
43,252,003,274, 489,856,000 Total possible configurations
26 Fewest number of moves needed to complete the cube
7 Age of Yoshiki Yumoto from Japan, the youngest person to solve a cube in under 20sec