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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

The article seem to be referring to the problem of manipulating a physical Rubik's cube. In that case, the bottleneck is the mechanical interaction, not the computation of the necessary steps, right? The real achievement here is the speed of robotic manipulation?

It's kind of misleading to phrase it as the chip solving it, when the focus is on the actuators.

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They didn't even improve actuation. Instead, they appear to have used a specially-constructed cube (no doubt designed to be suited for their machine) and literally bolted their actuators to the center caps. I'd like to see them do this with an unmodified vanilla cube like the other cube-solving machines I've seen.

If you want impressive actuators, check out modern pick-and-place machines [1].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8qkaTsr2_o

Luc suggests that it looks like an off-the-shelf cube: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12935104

Hmm, I guess that that's not a factor, then.

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.

It is not a new idea and now need to bolt anything, just drill some holes: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/watch-worlds-fastest-rubiks-cube-ro...

Confirmed – I have a MoYu Weilong stickerless at home. It looks identical to this cube.

Also, for awesome actuators, check out flying probes. Here a video from 2008, I think it's not sped up but I can't confirm:

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

The chip is targeting ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) applications, and I would assume that the hard part is to run vision algorithms (that is responsible for reading the cube and/or visual servo) on an automotive MCU, which almost always prioritizes safety and standard compliance at the cost of performance and has weird custom architecture (PowerPC in the auto world is already "mainstream"), at a really high frame rate.

You don't need "vision algorithms". Just average the color of a couple of pixels per square. The cube is always in the same place, no need to do anything fancy.

Flat colours in a 3x3 matrix? It's as if computers were meant to handle and manipulate data like that.

Technically 6x3x3 but true. ;)

You are the best kind of right.

That'll be because that's what the press release said. Any seasoned journalist would have re-nosed this story to lead on the fact that it is a machine that manipulates a physical cube very quickly and poor old Infineon would not even have got a mention.

For the comparison, this is a ~ 6 seconds solver made up entirely of Lego NXT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=staapsj3eRQ

It's an advertorial for Infineon.

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