Of course it does it without knowing what kind of plastic, metal, or wood the cube is made of. Anyways, since it seems you misunderstood the article slightly -

Of course it does it without knowing what kind of plastic, metal, or wood the cube is made of. Anyways, since it seems you misunderstood the article slightly - the 2010 brute-forcing was done with the help of a datacenter. The new guy estimates his method would take ~2 months on a single machine, maybe less, maybe more - it's a post, not a peer-reviewed paper.