Proving once again, machines are several orders of magnitude better at calculation than humans. This is both awesome and a bit disheartening at the same time since I still haven't been able to solve mine for the last year or so.
If it makes you feel better, the robot didn’t discover the method to solve the cube. Someone else programmed it. You can find many solving methods googling.
That's cheap, it's a special cube. And it took it 60 seconds just to grok the starting position. I would like to see a robot where you can toss it one mixed-up cube per second, and it solves them and tosses them back.
My thoughts as well, this is almost cheating. I would have liked to see the machine groking the cube while it is being solved.
Definitely true. What I really enjoyed was the different strategy compared with the other solving robots. The other robots were usually able to perform the whole spectrum of operations supported by the cube. In these case they selected a subset of operations in which this machine is able to perform extremely fast and built a strategy around that. And the result of the 'pure execution' is definitely outstanding!
Agreed. The engineering involved just from execution is already quite complex.
It does not look so cheap when compared to blindfolded solving.
Seems like this could be improved by simply adding 5 more cameras to the mix... each for a side of the cube. Doesn't look like it'd be too difficult to add it to the existing rig either. Perhaps that's a future plan for this project?