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Comment by mindgam3 | Hacker News Reader

> How is OpenAI misleading? ...When I saw the press release I understood the demonstration was about hand dexterity and not trying to use AI to solve a Rubik’s Cube pattern.

Uh... the headline of the article was literally "Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand".

Kudos to you for apparently reading past the headline and understanding that the demo was actually about hand dexterity. But come on. The average layman reading the headline is going to believe that what's newsworthy is that OpenAI solved a rubik's cube.

If OpenAI didn't intend for that to be the case, they should have used different words. For example, "Using a neural net to achieve a breakthrough in robot hand dexterity" would actually describe what the demo is about.

Unfortunately that is about 1000x less interesting than "AI robot solves rubik cube". Which is why OpenAI didn't choose that headline, and why people like Gary Marcus are criticizing them for being misleading.

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> Kudos to you for apparently reading past the headline and understanding that the demo was actually about hand dexterity. But come on. The average layman reading the headline is going to believe that what's newsworthy is that OpenAI solved a rubik's cube.

I criticize OpenAI's aggressive marketing as much as the next guy, but I don't actually feel this was one such case. I only ever assumed from the headline + video that they were using neural nets to control the hand, not to solve the Rubik's cube.

I'm not an average layman, though, so YMMV.

> Uh... the headline of the article was literally "Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand".

Which part of that statement isn't true?

You read that headline one way. Myself another. When someone actually reads the article (a lost art now) you get full context in case there was any confusion.

I'd argue that calling OpenAI misleading (in this instance) is even more misleading. From Marcus's Tweet I assumed that he had problems with OpenAI's actual claims. Nope. He just didn't like the headline.

More like 1/1000x, there are a bunch of rubik’s cube solvers on github.

Dexterity to manipulate a Rubik’s cube is really incredible, especially though the entire sequence of solving it. It’s a very well-chosen dexterity challenge.

This whole criticism is bizarre

The claim "I solved a Rubik's cube using a computer" is totally uninteresting.

The claim "I solved a Rubik's cube using a neural network" is different, and much more interesting than the first claim.

It really isn't. It's quite obviously possible and not worth the effort if you happen to know anything about Rubik's cubes and neural networks.

In fact, I would be much more interested in "I solved a Rubik's cube using a computer" because you can then talk about the mathematics of a Rubik's cube (presumably the algorithm used is a human-comprehensible one), while for "I solved a Rubik's cube using a neural network" the only sensible question is "and how badly did you have to overfit to do that?"

You can assume the "computer" solution is overfitted, too. There's no reason to, because general methods are well-known, but it's even easier to just hardcode a cube and the list of moves that solves it than it is to implement one of those general methods.

Why assume that "I solved a Rubik's cube using a neural network" guarantees that I cheated?

Yeah, because what they did is actually 1000x less interesting than actually solving the task, not just it "sounds" less interesting.

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