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Robot Solves Rubik's Cube In Less Than a Second (livescience.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from LiveScience: In just over half of a second (0.637 seconds), the Sub1 Reloaded robot made each side of the Rubik's Cube show a single color. This breaks the previous record of 0.887 seconds achieved by an earlier version of the same machine using a different processor. German technology company Infineon staged the record attempt at the Electronica trade fair in Munich this week, as a way to highlight its self-driving-car technology. The company provided one of the Sub1 Reloaded robot's microchips. Infineon said more than 43 quintillion combinations of the Rubik's Cube's colored squares are possible. That same number of cubes would cover Earth in 275 layers, resulting in an approximately 65.6-foot-high (20 meters) layer of Rubik's Cubes, the company added. The record-breaking attempt began with the press of a button. Sensor cameras on the machine had their shutters removed, and the computer was then able to detect how the cube was scrambled. The computing chip, or the "brain" of the machine as Infineon called it, then determined the fastest solution. Commands to execute the solution were sent to six motor-controlled arms. "It takes tremendous computing power to solve such a highly complex puzzle with a machine," Infineon said in a statement. "In the case of 'Sub1 Reloaded,' the power for motor control was supplied by a microcontroller from Infineon's AURIX family, similar to the one used in driver assistance systems."
How is solving a rubik's cube ANYTHING like self driving?
It isn't. Solving Rubiks Cube is trivial. Anybody can learn to do it, and many people can solve a randomized cube in under a minute.
A computer can find the solution in a few microseconds. The hard part isn't finding the solution in software, but building a mechanical contraption to rapidly twist the cube without breaking it. This is an achievement in mechanical engineering, not software. TFA completely skipped over the substance to focus on the trivial.
I've never used a Rubik's cube well enough manufactured that fewer than half of attempted rotations didn't stick so badly that forcing it would have broken it. They must have done something to fix up their cube.
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The hard part isn't finding the solution in software, but building a mechanical contraption to rapidly twist the cube without breaking it.
Not just building it, but controlling it. Both are hard problems, and both are limiting factors.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The machine solved a Rubik's Cube in less than a second. That's great! Ok, I think we can all agree that this task has been won by the machines. Any further attempt to make a Rubik's solving machine is a waste of time. How about designing a machine that can solve the 4X4X4 cube? That would be a lot more difficult, because you couldn't just stick suction cup rods to the center pieces. Or how about that 7X7X7 cube? Now *THAT* I would like to see!
Apparently it still works out to be that large, according to this:
There are 8! (40,320) ways to arrange the corner cubes. Seven can be oriented independently, and the orientation of the eighth depends on the preceding seven, giving 3^7 (2,187) possibilities. There are 12! / 2 (239,500,800) ways to arrange the edges, restricted from 12! because edges must be in an even permutation exactly when the corners are. [...] Eleven edges can be flipped independently, with the flip of the twelfth depending on the preceding ones, giving 2^11 (2,048) possibilities.
8! × 37 × (12! / 2) × 2^11 = 43,252,003,274,489,856,000
Including all permutations is about 12 times that, around 519 quintillion.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.