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Saurabh Narain and His Homemade Lego-Based Rubik's Cube Solver (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the round-and-round-the-little-cube-goes dept.

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)

6 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Puberty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    He will meet a girl and stop caring about building stuff in the basement. There are a lot of child prodigies that don't make it past puberty.

  2. "He's not alone" by Alopex · · Score: 2

    Judging by how awful the job prospects are in STEM relative to the amount of effort being put in, I'm going to hate the world in 10-20 years if the job market becomes even more flooded. Also, I find it incredibly hard to believe that a kid is a competitive engineer at that age, at least based on individual merit. I've seen a lot of smart kids, and then I've seen smart kids who are pushed/enabled by ambitious parents to take more credit than they're due. If I took a shot every time some fifteen year old "scientist" made a significant discovery, I wouldn't be writing frustrated posts on /.

    1. Re:"He's not alone" by wardred · · Score: 2

      If he's doing this at 12, and keeps his interest up, I don't think he'll have too much trouble. He also seems to genuinely enjoy what he's doing, rather than going for what he thinks will make money. If I owned an engineering company and he has anything as interesting as this coming out of high school, I'd be thinking about offering up a paid internship to him. (Getting in the news for your Whatever Faire accomplishments puts you well ahead of the pack compared to all the nameless faces out there.)

  3. Not original by nathana · · Score: 2

    Not to put this kid down, but that looks awfully similar to the MindCuber design that David Gilday came up with: http://www.mindcuber.com/

    -- Nathan

    1. Re:Not original by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      He says in the video that he modified Gilday's files.

  4. Completely Unimpressed by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?