Infineon chip solves Rubik’s Cube in 637 milliseconds
sciencebulletin.org
sciencebulletin.org
It doesn't. I can be done quickly on any conventional computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_solutions_for_Rubik%27...
The time is still impressive, but this doesn't showcase any real improvements to any technology.
It's kind of misleading to phrase it as the chip solving it, when the focus is on the actuators.
If you want impressive actuators, check out modern pick-and-place machines [1].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHsZQ1WiojE
edit: here a better impressions of flying probes, but not as fast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjmjYVNuLEE
Bolting the caps to the actuators was the bigger trick anyway. Compared to cages or grippers, dramatically reduced inertia and much stiffer, so less damping required and it's easier to dump energy back into the actuators. I'm half-tempted to call that "cheating", but I don't know what the actual rules are - I doubt that this robot can "put down" or "pick up" the cube in less than a minute or two. The older version had the cube actually soldered in.
At 60 fps, unless you're streaming subframe data you're looking at around 160ms ms per frame, and that's not counting any time for image processing.
(Presumably they could cheat by looking at the cube beforehand, but it sounds like a realtime thing)
More accurately - probably not. It depends how the actuators work and whether they include optical monitoring of the twist.
If so, the solution won't need to monitor the colours, but it will need to make sure the actuators spin the sides accurately.
Otherwise - cube explosion.
Daisy wheel printers were the first mass-market device with multiple powered mechanical moving parts coordinated entirely in software. The four actuators (daisy wheel stepper, hammer actuator, carriage stepper, and platen stepper) were connected only by electronics and software. Invented by David S. Lee.
Any 'legal' rotation is pretty easy on the insides, mechanically. You can adjust the tension and add some lube. It doesn't seem to do any corner-cutting in the slo-mo part of the video.
I do not think the term 'minicomputer' was intended to mean... a microcontroller.
Rubiks cubes are solved.
So it doesn't have to do the 'minimum' moves as they say, might waste time working it out.
But even so it probably does the minimum moves.
Since I think that's mostly easy, just hard to prove.
But either way, even if you add 5 moves to use a lookup table, back to hardware.
For humans rubiks cubes are very easy, just memorise the instructions. Books have been out for decades.
[Edit] it's interesting that they imply it might take more moves for physical reasons. Not sure if it's about destroying the cube or speed of turning.
Maybe they're counting moving the top and bottom at the same time as two separate moves? I don't know why it wouldn't just be considered moving the middle but that might be what they're talking about. They mentioned that it doesn't do it in the minimal amount of moves on the basis that it would take longer so I'm assuming that's it.
As far as the computational time needed to do so, it's absolutely trivial. This thing is built around a single microcontroller and it can handle 6 stepper motors, solving the cube, vision processing, and state tracking all by itself. The only thing impressive about this is how fast the cube is being manipulated but even that might not be too impressive considering the fact that they just attached stepper motors directly to the center piece of each face as opposed to using an unmodified Rubik's cube.
It might often be useful to spin opposite faces in different directions. Two moves by normal counting, but done in the time of one.
Perhaps they do only use visual feedback for determining the state, which would be a better demo, but I doubt anyone would be able know from that article!
Well, that's some serious 1983 Omni Magazine shit right there.
(Sorry to point it out, but it just seems like maybe the sort of thing we're past having to ELI5 nowadays.)