BUDAPEST : Japan's Yu Nakajima won the Rubik's Cube World Championships on Sunday in Budapest, the birthplace of the cult puzzle.

Nakajima averaged 12.46 seconds in arranging the six different colours of the six-sided classic 3x3 cube, which has nine panels on each side to arrange.

He beat Andrew Kang of the United States and Mitsuki Gunji, a fellow Japanese national.

But Frenchman Thibaut Jacquinot still holds the world record of 9.86 seconds in the classic 3x3 event, which he set last May.

Hometown favourite Matyas Kuti, 14, set a world record in the larger 5x5 cube competition with an average time of 1:45:07. Kuti also won in two other categories.

Anssi Vanhala of Finland one the feet-only challenge, aligning the colours of the 3x3 cube in 49.33 seconds.

Nearly 300 participants from 33 countries tried their hands and feet with the multicoloured cube on the 25th anniversary of the the first Rubik's World Championships, which was also held in the Hungarian capital in 1982.

The Rubik's Cube became one of the cult objects of the 1980s and the toy is experiencing a revival these days with millions of cubes sold annually.

More than 300 million cubes have been sold to date and organisers said 12 million will go on the shelves this year alone.

The Rubik's Cube, an invention of Hungarian architect Erno Rubik, has been exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art and has entered into the Oxford dictionary. - AFP/de