Got a Rubik’s cube or seen one at least? Who hasn’t? You know those colorful, six-sided little-cubbed nuisances sorry boxes that come in a variety of solid colors that you are supposed to disarrange like a petulant child in need of a spanking and put back again like a Lego piece? Except that the putting back part with its total 43 quintillion possible combinations is harder than sprouting wings and flying to the Moon for a food festival! For you that is. A nifty Robot got that part right down. The Sub1 Reloaded robot took just 0.637 seconds to analyze the cubed little toy and make 21 warp speed moves that correctly rearranged the mismatched cube faces way faster than you can say “boo.”
It worked so fast that the subsequent video of its exploits had to be slowed down 12x to make it even viewable by us dumbos. An earlier version of the same machine with a slower and less capable processor also set a world record way back in January by solving the Rubik’s cube in a ‘slow’ 0.887 seconds. The human record on the other hand is a rather longish 4.904 seconds set by a 14-year-old whiz-kid Lucas Etter way back in November 2015. Nice right? Except that, an ungrateful youth recently eclipsed him by completing the task in an even faster 4.74 seconds.
Want to know how the Sub1 reloaded did it? No, not with alien tech, but rather with one of the fastest and most capable microcomputers -the Infineon Aurix, normally used in self-driving cars. A simple button press started off the festivities, lifting the shutters covering the computer’s sensors and allowing it to deduce how the cube had been scrambled. It then conceived a solution and transmitted instructions to its 6 motor-controlled arms, which then spun the cube faces into perfect alignment.The new record is Guinness World Records worthy, with a claim to be filed to and verified by the organization anytime soon.
The new record is Guinness World Records worthy, with a claim to be filed to and verified by the organization anytime soon. Here is the record-breaking video for you.
