Lego Robot Solves Any Rubik's Cube In 12 Seconds 224
kkleiner writes "Cube Stormer is the latest creation from Mike Dobson, aka Robotics Solutions, and not only is it made entirely out of Legos, it can solve any 3x3 Rubik's cube in less than twelve seconds. Often it can finish in less than five! This thing looks bad-ass and is incredible to watch."
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
You can use trademarks as adjectives. The rest of the world uses them as nouns and verbs. Get over it.
Re:How they are doing it? (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably didn't debug it much, but in actuality - most of it is pattern recognition. If you look straight down the corner of one Rubiks cube, you will see 3 faces of it, and that is all you actually need to solve the Rubiks cube. All the pros merely remember the patterns and the steps required to solve each pattern. Rotate the cube 90 degrees and the pattern still exists, even though things are in a different shape.
Really, the programming side of this isn't that impressive once you know how Rubiks cube solving is done. I'm more impressed at the speed, which I've normally found Lego technic and Mindstorm products to be a little laggy in commands and slow to operate, keep in mind though, that was the stuff I used like 7 years ago.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people who care about that pointless distinction are trademark lawyers.
For the rest of us, they're simply called LEGOS.
Re:Not impressive (Score:1, Insightful)
Your "joke" is about as impressive.
Re:But can it... (Score:2, Insightful)
And people wonder why the robots are going to revolt and dominate us.
Heh that's nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
I have one I HAVEN'T solved in 30 years. Young kids, always wanting to do everything in a rush...
Re:Obligatory (Score:1, Insightful)
Those that make fun of the first group and those who are utterly baffled at using a singular noun to describe something that is only interesting in the plural.
Re:Not impressive (Score:1, Insightful)
Are you also confused when people say a piece of a lumber is a 2x4?
You're retarded.
Re:This Video is FAKE (Score:3, Insightful)
I think your definition of "fake" and mine differ. The video is certainly not fake. It's a Lego machine that can solve a Rubics Cube that is being blogged about by some random overzealous blogger. The 2 and 4 second solves were probably the engineer running test cases where he took a solved cube and rotated it a certain number of times to see if the machine would then solve it in the same number of rotations. It's fairly obvious that the machine isn't capable of solving a random cube in 2-4 seconds because it doesn't move fast enough.
Oh, for fucks sake, IT'S A LEGO ROBOT SOLVING A RUBICS CUBE!
The sudoko is seems more impressive (Score:3, Insightful)
mind you, the cubic solver is nice looking and has a lot of attention paid to making it look good, but it seems to be using a netbook. The sudoko seems to be using ONLY its onboard lego controller, and it has that human touch of writing with a real pen that makes it spooky. The math may be simpler, the robotics seems far more complex. I can almost imagine that robot driving around looking for dropped newspapers to solve the puzzles :P
The sudoko also wins for me because while all the principles involved are simple enough, getting it all to work together so smoothly is anything but.
Cubestorm for looks and sheer speed, sudoko robot for neatness and purity.