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Saurabh Narain and His Homemade Lego-Based Rubik's Cube Solver (Video)
Here's another one Tim spotted at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014: A Rubik's Cube solver made by 12-year-old Saurabh Narain. He's in 7th grade -- and started soldering in 2nd grade and messing with Linux in 3rd grade. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Tim asked. "An engineer..." (not that you couldn't have guessed). There may be faster Rubik's Cube solvers, and there may be slicker-looking ones, but Saurabh's is a lot more elegant, if you define engineering elegance as getting the most accomplished with the fewest possible parts, using the simplest possible design. And both of the fancier Rubik's Cuber solvers linked to in this paragraph were made by adult engineers, while Saurabh is 12. Can you imagine what he'll be like at 18? Or 28? Not that he's alone; there are lots of other engineering prodigies out there. The next 10 or 20 years are going to be amazing if we encourage young people to go into STEM, and even 5% of them are as smart as Saurabh. (Alternate Video Link)
He says in the video that he modified Gilday's files.
Not to take away from what this kid did (certainly more than what I did in 7th grade), but it is far from original.
What exactly DID he do? It looks like he simply built a MindCuber and added a few tweaks. This is not at all impressive. The reason I recognized it for what it is is that my 10 year old son did almost exactly the same thing: built the MindCuber from the available instructions and ran the code. It looks like this kid added a few tweaks but other than that it is almost identical to the published plans.
Things are getting really bad if a primary school kid who can build a complex Lego kit from instructions is now such a rarity that it's newsworthy. Now if he had designed and built it from scratch including the algorithm to solve the cube then I would be impressed but building a lego robot from available instructions? Really?