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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? That's worse than thinking a computer that can solve Go is ready to drive a car.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I remember last time this machine set the record, there was some debate as to whether it should count, as the cube has to be modified in order to be mounted in it. The robot doesn't grasp the cube, but rather its six arms have pins that are inserted into holes drilled in the center square of each side.
Although that doesn't include the time he was allowed to examine it before starting. Here's the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLksISrKtO8
As resilient as these toys are, I'm not sure a standard Rubik's Cube could stand up to that kind of violence...
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Solves -which- permutation of a Rubik's cube in less than a second? Every single one? How can they prove that before the end of the universe?
It has been proven that 20 moves suffice to solve Rubik's Cube from any starting position.
If you restrict each move to a quarter turn, then 26 moves suffice.
The proof only took 35 years of CPU time.
That's why we make them. My chainsaw makes much faster work of a tree than I could chewing it with my teeth. I don't even want to think how long that would take.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
it just applied a new set of colored stickers to each side to make it appear to have been solved!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
They're making the cube sound harder than it is. The difficulty doesn't correspond well to the number of combinations. Back in the 80s when I played with them, the solution technique I knew was based on recognizing that the components of a cube could be flipped or twisted, with the flip or twist balanced out by another component. Then you simply executed moves to undo the flip or twist. My best times were 3 minutes or so, which sucks now but I bet the solution algorithms have gotten way more sophisticated. Anyway, a kid can memorize the algorithm so it can't be that hard. I'm guessing any modern CPU executes it so fast that most of the time is taken up by the movements of the robot.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?