OpenAI Inc. demonstrated a one-handed robot solving a Rubik's Cube. Apparently the real breakthrough in this milestone was teaching the system to do the task in simulation. “While the video makes it easy to focus on the physical robot, the magic is mostly happening in simulation, and transferring things learned in simulation to the real world," writes Evan Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum:

The researchers point out that the method they’ve developed here is general purpose, and you can train a real-world robot to do pretty much any task that you can adequately simulate. You don’t need any real-world training at all, as long as your simulations are diverse enough, which is where the automatic domain randomization comes in. The long-term goal is to reduce the task specialization that’s inherent to most robots, which will help them be more useful and adaptable in real-world applications.

Read the rest

We previously posted about a robot that solved a Rubik's Cube in .637 seconds. Read the rest

Rubik's cube for two as a race. That's Rubik's Race. Read the rest

This is more impressive to me than being able to solve it in 1.2552 nanoseconds or whatever the current record is.

(GlobalMagicians) Read the rest

Maciej Czapiewski set the world record when he solved this 2x2x2 cube at the Grudziądz Open. At this size, there's a bit of luck of the draw, but the skill is undeniable. Read the rest

Russian speed-cuber Evgeny Bondarenko decided to tackle the biggest challenge on the market today: solving the 17x17x17 Rubik's Cube. Talk about concentration! Read the rest

Puzzle maker Tony Fisher, who was in the 2017 edition of Guinness Book of World Records for creating the world's largest Rubik's cube, may have just created the world's most scrumptious Rubik's cube as well. Here he makes a fully functional Rubik's cube out of chocolate.

Fisher also made a Rubik's cube out of ice, as well as cheese (but this one he refers to as "crap"). Read the rest

This machine solves Rubik's cube in no more than 0.38 seconds. This is much faster than the previous world record of 0.637 seconds and its creators, Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo, think there's plenty of optimization space left.

That was a Rubik's cube being solved in 0.38 seconds. The time is from the moment the keypress is registered on the computer, to when the last face is flipped. It includes image capture and computation time, as well as actually moving the cube. The motion time is ~335 ms, and the remaining time image acquisition and computation. For reference, the current world record is/was 0.637 seconds.

The machine can definitely go faster, but the tuning process is really time consuming since debugging needs to be done with the high speed camera, and mistakes often break the cube or blow up FETs. Looking at the high-speed video, each 90 degree move takes ~10 ms, but the machine is actually only doing a move every ~15 ms. For the time being, Jared and I have both lost interest in playing the tuning game, but we might come back to it eventually and shave off another 100 ms or so.

This makes me think of movies which depict mankind fighting the machines. A careful fantasy is often constructed, where the machines are superior in speed, durability and capability to humans, but not so much so that ingenuity and cunning cannot overcome them.

The truth is that the gun turret will detect you, turn on you, shoot you and kill you as fast as this robot knocks out the cube. Read the rest

Last week we witnessed the Star Wars "Cantina Band" theme song being played with a pencil as a math formula. Now, YouTuber TheCubician has made of a video of him playing the song simply by manipulating a Rubik's Cube.

It now seems like a challenge to come up with new, crazy ways to play the song. What's the logical progression of this? The spoons? Bong hits? What you got, internet?

!function(){function t(){for(h=[],n=document.getElementsByTagName("iframe"),i=0;in?360:n)+"px")}var n,i,o,a,h=[],c="";(a=window.addEventListener)||(a=window.attachEvent)&&(c="on"),a(c+"load",t),a(c+"resize",e),t()}(); Read the rest

In this clip, magician Paul Vu spends a few minutes blowing Ellen's mind with his Rubik's Cube tricks. Though, I kind of got the feeling that she didn't like being duped by Vu, even in fun. Did you notice that too?

(Likecool) Read the rest

Starting in 1980, spurred by popularity of the Rubik's Cube, UK-based Tony Fisher started passionately collecting "twisty puzzles."

Over the years, he's become quite the collector and inventor. All his "transformations" are really impressive. In fact, in 2016, he became a Guinness World Record holder for "World's Largest Rubik's Cube."

Well, now he has fashioned a fully-functional Rubik's Cube out of ice.

He explains:

This is my Rubik's Cube made from 95% ice and it is fully functional. All 8 corners and 12 edges are solid ice. The 6 centres are 50% ice and the core is plastic. The screws and springs are regular metal ones. The puzzle shown is a first attempt and works surprising well. I am thinking about making others with full ice centres and also fully coloured ones.

This video doesn't show how he made it and you'll see that the video footage is reversed in the beginning, making the melting ice seemingly "build" the toy. He does, however, write that he'll be posting the construction video soon.

(Daily Mail)

Previously: WATCH: World record smallest 7x7x7 Rubik's Cube Read the rest

If an entire 3x3 Rubik's Cube is too much, but a 2x2 one too plainly insulting, try this 2x3 one that you can get for about a fiver at Amazon. That's four ninths of a real Rubik's Cube for nine tenths of the price!

The product page assures you in its first bullet point that this puzzle contains "no fabrics." SOLD. Read the rest

A couple of days ago I mentioned the the MoYu YJ Lingpo 2 x 2 x 2 Speed Cube. I still haven't solved it, but I wanted to make a quick video to show how smooth it is. The little cubes rotate around a plastic sphere, and are connected by springs. It's practically impossible to jam it, unlike every other Rubik's Cube I've used. I thought it would be a snap to solve, having only 8 cubes (compared to the 27 26 cubes of a regular Rubik's cube) but it turns out I'm even dumber than I thought. I'm not giving up! Read the rest

15-year-old Patrick Ponce just set a staggering new world record for solving a Rubik's cube. Read the rest

University of Michigan mechanical engineering students have built "the world's largest hand-solvable, stationary" Rubik's Cube. Fashioned primarily from aluminum, it weighs 1,500 pounds but can be manipulated by one person. The puzzle is available for solving in the campus's mechanical engineering building. From Michigan Engineering:

They realized they couldn’t simply scale up the approach a handheld cube relies on because the friction would be too great. So to keep friction minimal, they devised a setup that utilizes rollers and transfer bearings.

“This is a truly amazing and unique kinematic mechanism that functions as a Rubik's cube,” said Noel Perkins, the Donald T. Greenwood Collegiate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and advisor to the students.

“There is no other human-manipulable cube like this, to the best of our knowledge. That said, it is not technically the largest cube. We're aware of a larger cube that requires the user to literally roll it on the ground to solve and rotate the faces. None of that is required by our stationary design. So to be very precise, it is the world's largest stationary, human manipulable Rubik's cube.”

Read the rest

Mats Valk used a custom Rubik's Cube tricked out with neodymium magnets to set a new world record for speed cubing: 4.74 seconds. Read the rest

In this Scientific American video, Rubik's Cube master Ian Scheffler, author of the new book Cracking the Cube, explains some of the math behind "speedcubing." Scheduler's book sounds fascinating even though the only way I could get my Rubik's Cube solved is to hand it to my 10-year-old son's friend Luc who was the first to dazzle me with the fine art of speedcubery.

From the description of Cracking the Cube:

When Hungarian professor Ernő Rubik invented the Rubik’s Cube (or, rather, his Cube) in the 1970s out of wooden blocks, rubber bands, and paper clips, he didn’t even know if it could be solved, let alone that it would become the world’s most popular puzzle. Since its creation, the Cube has become many things to many people: one of the bestselling children’s toys of all time, a symbol of intellectual prowess, a frustrating puzzle with 43.2 quintillion possible permutations, and now a worldwide sporting phenomenon that is introducing the classic brainteaser to a new generation.

In Cracking the Cube, Ian Scheffler reveals that cubing isn’t just fun and games. Along with participating in speedcubing competitions—from the World Championship to local tournaments—and interviewing key figures from the Cube’s history, he journeys to Budapest to seek a meeting with the legendary and notoriously reclusive Rubik, who is still tinkering away with puzzles in his seventies.

Getting sucked into the competitive circuit himself, Scheffler becomes engrossed in solving Rubik’s Cube in under twenty seconds, the quasi-mystical barrier known as “sub-20,” which is to cubing what four minutes is to the mile: the difference between the best and everyone else.