How do we know this hasn't been faked? It would be easy to calculate the moves before hand and program them into the computer. Very little is as it seems.
I'm with you. It took me the better part of a week, and knowing what I know (you have "to develop" your own science) about the arrangement of the "corners," this looks staged to me.
The time required to compute the solution is negligible compared to the time needed for the mechanical movement of the cube faces. If a human being can find the solution in a few minutes, a modern computer can do it in milliseconds.
A web search will pull up repositories of open source software for solving Rubick’s Cube along with benchmarks showing the time required for the computation.
This would be *very* easy to fake. All you need to do is to get a Rubik's Cube which has already been solved, and then jumble it up a few times. Then the computer runs that same process in reverse, and it looks as if it solved it by itself.
Personally I'm more puzzled by how the cube didn't fall apart at that speed!
Probably brought to you by the same lab which brought us "cold fusion" some years ago. Some people believed in that for a while. (And it was in Utah, which makes it marginally relevant to this forum.)
It would also be *very* easy to do for real, once you’ve got the mechanical part working.
The software to solve the cube is fast and readily available. The state of a random cube could be entered by hand, or (more likely) could be measured with cameras using common off the shelf machine vision software.
The hard part is mechanically rotating the faces of the cube at such speed. If you can believe that a group from MIT can do that, there’s no point creating conspiracy theories around the rest.
That left me skeptical. There's no doubt a computer could generate a solution in milliseconds; I note, however, the programmer must know how to "solve" the cube in the first place in order to create the software to effect the solution. That solution probably has to be the most parsimonious one taking into account the need to coordinate which cube face is rotated when. I recall reading online accounts that were "illuminating" to me because they began with different parameters than the one I used.
There's also the matter of inputting the data on the initial positions of the cube faces. Was this done optically?
It’s a speed demonstration for a robot. Of course the moves are precomputed. Looks pretty cool. A robot like that could put professional Rubik’s Cube solvers out of work.
Rubik's Cubes are just a bit of fun, and a bit of mental exercise. It's a bit like chess computers... many people still enjoy chess, and no computer will ever put them off that, even if its abilities are vastly superior.
This is totally possible. When I was sixteen, a friend showed me how to solve the rubik's cube. You do it one layer at a time with pre-determined moves, based on existing patterns. Everything is relative to the center pieces which are fixed and can't be moved. We used to take the cubes apart, sand them where needed, and use vaseline to lubricate them before putting them back together. Any manual/logical task I can do in a minute can be done by a computer in a fraction of a second. But with the center pieces held in place, I can't see what is moving the rest of the pieces. Some mechanical thing has to rotate the edges and I can't see anything like that in the video.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2019 11:35AM by azsteve.
Lethbridge Reprobate Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > We bought one when they were all the rage...and it > met it's just demise. I hate puzzles so you can > speculate at to what became of it.
I remember when they came in. There was a sequel puzzle - I forget the name - and that was more fun in some ways though fragile. It was a good way to shut up kids for days on end.
Some people I knew would remove the stickers on the cheap ones and replace them to make it look like the puzzle was solved. Unfortunately that meant that when it was jumbled again, I think there were problems.
The solving moves were probably all programmed-in before the moves started, based on the specific starting pattern. Theoretically, it should be possible to write a program to let anyone randomly scramble the cube and then the machine resolves under any given starting pattern. It's probably easier than teaching a computer to win at chess.
The way I learned to resolve the cube, there are only five or six different types of moves (series of shifts to get a desired result). The goal is to solve the colors one layer at a time (bottom, middle, top). When you see a given pattern on the layer you are working on, you do a specific move to put the colored square you want to where it goes, in a way that doesn't mess-up your previous work. The last few moves on the top layer are the most complex. But for most of the moves, you don't know why they work. You just do a complex series of moves based on the starting pattern and it works in a way to move your intended piece in to place without messing-up your previous work. Actual resolution times should vary based on how many actual moves were required to resolve the given starting pattern. Sometimes because of luck, much fewer moves are needed.
A computer should be able to be most efficient. Instead of five or six different types of moves that put one piece into place at a time, it could shift to solve most efficiently, every piece in to place all at the same time, based on the shortest number of moves possible, no matter how complex the required moves have to be to do it. Like a chess master, the computer would think several moves ahead instead of just working on the next move without thinking ahead yet about following moves. The order of resolution for each piece for a human is random and usually starts with the layer you're most used to working on first (example: white as bottom layer always). But theoretically, the computer would solve in the most optimal order to achieve the shortest number of moves, without favoring any specific color as (home-base). I've tried to switch my home color (bottom layer face color) and at best, it's very slow because of the mental shift (mental translations of color patterns needed) that are required. Often with a new home color, you get lost in the middle of a series of shifts and have to start over when you see your former home color is lost in the mash and then you forget where you were in the middle of a series of moves.
The method I use is done in the following order: 1.) Bottom (home color) corner pieces (4 pieces) 2.) Bottom layer edge pieces (4 pieces) then bottom layer is done 3.) Middle layer edge pieces (4 pieces) then middle layer is done 4.) Top layer corner pieces (4 pieces) 5.) Top layer edge pieces (4 pieces) then cube is done
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2019 09:55AM by azsteve.