Collin Burns

Collin Burns is an American speedcuber who formerly held the world record for solving the Rubik’s Cube in 5.25 seconds.

Biography

In 2014, Burns set a North American continental record of 5.93 seconds for solving the 3×3×3 cube, and he beat the world champion at the time, Feliks Zemdegs, in the US Nationals 2014 speedcubing competition.

On April 25, 2015, Burns set the world record for the fastest 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube single solve with a time of 5.25. The solve was recorded at a Rubik's Cube competition at Central Bucks West High School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He set the record age 15, and used the YuXin brand 3×3×3 cube. Burns solved the cube 0.3 seconds faster than the previous world record of 5.55 seconds, set by Mats Valk. His record lasted approximately seven months until being broken by Lucas Etter with a time of 4.90 on November 21, 2015.

Burns is now a researcher in the field of AI alignment. In 2020, a team of researchers, including Dan Hendrycks and Burns, developed the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) model, a benchmark to assess large-language models.

References

  1. ↑ "Collin Burns". World Cube Association. Retrieved 21 May 2015.
  2. ↑ "US Nationals 2014 | World Cube Association". World Cube Association. Retrieved 2026-03-30.
  3. ↑ "Doylestown Spring 2015 | World Cube Association". www.worldcubeassociation.org. Retrieved 2025-04-09.
  4. 1 2 Eng, J (2015-04-28). "5.25 seconds! American teen Collin Burns sets Rubik's Cube world record". Local3News.com. Retrieved 2026-03-30. Burns, a home-schooled 15-year-old, set his record at a World Cube Association competition on Saturday at Central Bucks West High School.
  5. 1 2 Visser, Nick (27 April 2015). "Teen Collin Burns Absolutely Destroys Rubik's Cube, Sets New World Record". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 21 May 2015. His record is expected to stand, Mashable reported, meaning the competition was legitimate and Burns will hold the official world record.
  6. 1 2 3 Eleftheriou-Smith, Loulla-Mae (27 April 2015). "Watch teenager Collin Burns break the Rubik's Cube world record by solving puzzle in just 5.25 seconds". The Independent. Retrieved 21 May 2015.
  7. ↑ Fong, Joss (2015-07-22). "How a 15-year-old solved a Rubik's Cube in 5.25 seconds". Vox. Retrieved 2026-04-05.
  8. ↑ D'Orazio, Dante (2015-04-26). "Teenager cuts nearly a third of a second off Rubik's Cube world record". The Verge. Retrieved 2026-03-30.
  9. ↑ "Lucas Etter | World Cube Association". World Cube Association. Retrieved 2026-03-30.
  10. ↑ "Records | World Cube Association". World Cube Association. Retrieved 2026-03-30.
  11. ↑ "Collin Burns". collinpburns.com. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
  12. ↑ Hendrycks, Dan; Burns, Collin; Basart, Steven; Zou, Andy; Mazeika, Mantas; Song, Dawn; Steinhardt, Jacob (2020-09-07). "Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding". arXiv.org. Retrieved 2026-03-30.
  13. ↑ Liang, Percy; Bommasani, Rishi; Lee, Tony; Tsipras, Dimitris; Soylu, Dilara; Yasunaga, Michihiro; Zhang, Yian; Narayanan, Deepak; Wu, Yuhuai (2022-11-16). "Holistic Evaluation of Language Models". arXiv.org. Retrieved 2026-03-30.
  14. ↑ Li, Haonan; Zhang, Yixuan; Koto, Fajri; Yang, Yifei; Zhao, Hai; Gong, Yeyun; Duan, Nan; Baldwin, Timothy (August 2024). Ku, Lun-Wei; Martins, Andre; Srikumar, Vivek (eds.). "CMMLU: Measuring massive multitask language understanding in Chinese". Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024. Bangkok, Thailand: Association for Computational Linguistics: 11260–11285. arXiv:2306.09212. doi:10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.671.