Items tagged with rubik's cube
A robot hand called Dactyl has successfully solved a Rubik's cube using a training regime that the AI behind the scenes created. The deal here isn't so much that it was able to solve the Rubik's cube, but that it did the task with a new level of dexterity. The robot arm was able to solve the '80s puzzle game with a single hand. Solving the puzzle cube with a single hand is a big deal, according to roboticist Dmitry Berenson from the University of Michigan. The manipulation required to rotate the parts of the cube is much "harder" than rotating the entire cube. Robots traditionally only manipulate objects in simple ways. Roboticists use simulation to reduce the amount of real-world training...
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Anyone around in the '80s certainly played with a Rubik's Cube at some point. And many of those people probably ended up peeling stickers off to solve the infuriating puzzle. Researchers from the University of California-Irvine have created an AI system that is able to solve the Rubik's Cube in just over a second; it's called DeepCubeA. The scientists say that the AI system can solve the puzzle without any in-game coaching from humans or specific domain knowledge. In some circles, the Rubik's Cube is still a big deal, in 2015 a teen set a world record for solving a Rubik's Cube in 5.25 seconds. The AI system can solve the puzzle cube in a fraction of that time. Study senior author, Pierre Baldi,...
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Anyone who has lived through the 1980s knows how maddeningly difficult it is to solve a Rubik's Cube, and to accomplish the feat without peeling the stickers off and rearranging them. It's not just challenging for humans, either. Apparently the six-sided contraption presents a special kind of challenge to modern deep learning techniques that makes it more difficult than, say, learning to play chess or Go. That used to be the case, anyway. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a new deep learning technique that can teach itself to solve the Rubik's Cube. What they come up with is very different than an algorithm designed to solve the toy from any position. It's...
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It took a little more than two years for someone to set a new Rubik's Cube record after Colins Burns, then a teenager at Central West High School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, solved the 3x3x3 contraption in just 5.253 seconds. Now the record sits at 4.221 seconds, achieved by Feliks Zemdegs, a 22-year-old from Australia who was all smiles—and in disbelief—after smashing the previous record. He beat the previous time by a full second (and change), which doesn't sound like much on the surface, but is a huge win when you're talking about spinning a complex cube into a perfect colorful arrangement in such quick fashion. He's no stranger to setting records, either. After purchasing his...
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As difficult as a Rubik's Cube puzzle is to solve to a human, it might not seem like that complicated of a problem. We're talking about a mere 6-sided cube with 9 segments on each side. How hard could it be? Well, for humans, most people would take several minutes, but at least one dedicated solver can make it happen in just under 5 seconds. Surely a computer could be an order of magnitude better than that? You'd be surprised. Infineon has just announced that with its AURIX microcontroller and its own processors, the Rubik's puzzle can be solved in 0.637 seconds, which is a new world record. Considering the fact that PCs can calculate hundreds of thousands of digits of Pi in a handful of...
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It's time for a confession -- I've never solved a Rubik's Cube, at least not without cheating (peeling off the stickers and rearranging them is surely against the rules). I never will, and I'm okay with that. But I can appreciate that others have solved the maddening cube of half a dozen solid colors, though none faster than Colin Burns, a teenager who thrilled a crowd of onlookers over the weekend at Central Bucks West High School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. It took Colins a mere 5.253 seconds to solve Rubik's 3x3x3 contraption, besting the previous record held by Mats Valk from the Netherlands, who accomplished the same feat in 5.55 seconds. Colins is one of only eight people to have correctly...
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