Video Saurabh Narain and His Homemade Lego-Based Rubik's Cube Solver (Video) 43
Tim: Saurabh, what are you standing right behind here?
Saurabh: I’m standing right behind this LEGO Rubik’s Cube Solver. What it does is, it solves the Rubik’s cube in under 30 moves in less than 100 seconds. So here it is – right now it’s scanning the cube and observing it. The special feature it has is it only scans five sides, for the last side it can just subtract from the nine and then get each one of those individual colors on the bottom. So it’s scanning right now. Right now this IR sensor is also here, so it detects the cube when it’s present or not. There’s a turn-table here that turns the cube and the scan-arm that goes back and forth for the LED or color sensor to get the light and the color.
Tim: How long does this take to engineer?
Saurabh: This took about a month to build.
Tim: What was the reason to take this as a project?
Saurabh: Because I couldn’t solve Rubik’s cube, and I learned how to solve it. Then I looked up some different robots that could solve it. Then based on those I tried making my own and here it is.
Tim: The programming—was it a very difficult task?
Saurabh: Yeah, programming was a pretty difficult task. I have C files from David Gilday also. I’ve modified it a little bit and tweaked it to work with this robot here. And what it basically does is, it finds a Rubik’s cube in any position and it’s able to guess all this cores and the centerpieces of each cube. And also what it does is, it’s able to solve the cube, even if it’s already solved it will say ‘solved’. And it has some intelligent software to also predict what’s going to happen next with the cube. So it only has to scan it once not every time it makes a single move.
Tim: So, how about the physical manipulation aspect, how long did that take to figure out?
Saurabh: Oh it took some time. Because when I was tweaking the arm, sometimes it just wouldn’t work and then I had to re-tweak it and re-modify, modify modify everything again. So say for this arm, once I tweaked one part the other part would stop working. So then it would take much more time to fix that part and then modify each and every one.
Tim: Have you actually destroyed or hurt any Rubik’s cubes?
Saurabh: Yeah, actually, in fact here, I will show you. I had destroyed this Rubik’s cube here, I was solving it and then it just fell off without solving it, but it’s been destroyed, but I am finally going to glue that back on.
Tim: It seems like a tough thing to figure out exactly how much force it takes to do the twisting and to manipulate against the friction of the internals?
Saurabh: Yeah, yeah.
Tim: So, this is a silly question I guess, but I think I can ask it of you: What do you want to do when you grow up?
Saurabh: I definitely want to be a software or hardware engineer, so yeah.
Tim: So it seems like you’re 90% there at this point, maybe 99% there?
Saurabh: Yeah.
Tim: What is your next target, do you have anything in mind?
Saurabh: Actually, I was working on a robot that’s going to be solving a Rubik’s cube of course, but it’s going to be using four arms instead of just one here. So it will be able to solve Rubik’s cubes much, much faster. It will also be much more productive and have more algorithms for it. This is going to have less algorithms because it only has a lower range of movement, so yeah.
Tim: So, how about the basis of the physical parts, is this Lego Mindstorms?
Saurabh: Yeah, this is actually Lego Mindstorms. It has one EV3 here on this side as you can see. And it has one IR sensor to detect if the cube is present or not, one color sensor to check each individual color of the cube, and three motors: one motor turns this arm here, the other motor turns the turn-table and it turns the turn-table; this arm turns the cube with this motor and this little medium motor—all it does, it goes back and forth. So if you can see here that’s the arm turning it. And here’s the medium motor and here is the turn-table and here is the scan-arm which goes over the cube and starts scanning it.
Tim: Now the thing about this is, if you have four arms, are you going to stay with Lego Mindstorms?
Saurabh: Yeah. It’s a really easy base to work with -– you can take apart things easily. If you use metal parts and fuse them together, it’d be a lot of times that you actually defuse them and take them apart. So Lego Mindstorms is like a good base for me to build over.
Tim: What is your programming environment it is the Mindstorms?
Saurabh: It is the Mindstorms language, it’s called EV3G. It’s basically LabVIEW modified by LEGO and they gave the software, and I have the student edition of the software which allows me to do experiments and also to create programs.
Tim: If you’re going to be making it more complex algorithmically, a more complex device, is that still going to be in the LEGO Mindstorms language or you’re going to switch to a different environment.
Saurabh: Maybe ROBOTC. ROBOTC is another good software that I’ve been using for programming other types of robots, Tetrix space robots, where ROBOTC would be another thing I could use to program the robots.
Tim: And the code you’ve created to do this, do you release it to other people?
Saurabh: Actually, it’s already been released but I’ve modified it. I haven’t released my own modified version but maybe I will be doing that and also releasing my modified instructions too.
Tim: Good, that way a lot of people can benefit from it.
Saurabh: Yeah, yeah.
Tim: Right. Thanks for showing it here.
Saurabh: You’re welcome.
Tim: Thanks very much.
Puberty (Score:4, Funny)
He will meet a girl and stop caring about building stuff in the basement. There are a lot of child prodigies that don't make it past puberty.
"He's not alone" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't that. It is that STEM careers pays so much less than Basketball, Football, and Baseball. That, and talent is well paid for in sports in general, but you can't get well paid unless you invent something and get it to market before someone steals the idea and clones it.
Anyone else pretty bored by Rubiks Cubes? (Score:1)
I get it. We can solve it mathematically. We can manipulate them with computers. We can inspect them with optics. We can do this all VERY FAST. That was news 5-10 years ago. There is literally nothing new left in the field.
Re: (Score:2)
Copy? (Score:1)
Not to take away from what this kid did (certainly more than what I did in 7th grade), but it is far from original. I'm not too sure why it is newsworthy.
Similar style of lego rubiks cube solver from 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWkZ51yxvis - and I know similar ones exist from at least that timeframe.
Re: (Score:2)
Completely Unimpressed (Score:3, Informative)
Not to take away from what this kid did (certainly more than what I did in 7th grade), but it is far from original.
What exactly DID he do? It looks like he simply built a MindCuber [mindcuber.com] and added a few tweaks. This is not at all impressive. The reason I recognized it for what it is is that my 10 year old son did almost exactly the same thing: built the MindCuber from the available instructions and ran the code. It looks like this kid added a few tweaks but other than that it is almost identical to the published plans.
Things are getting really bad if a primary school kid who can build a complex Lego kit from instructions
Not original (Score:3)
Not to put this kid down, but that looks awfully similar to the MindCuber design that David Gilday came up with: http://www.mindcuber.com/ [mindcuber.com]
-- Nathan
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
He says in the video that he modified Gilday's files.
Re: (Score:2)
If he only modified an existing design, I'm a lot less impressed.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not saying I'm not impressed, I'm saying I'm a lot less impressed.
Maker not inventor (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do we also worry that China and India graduate more lawyers? There's a problem here. We accept that technology makes us so productive that a few people are all that's needed to make a world-wide impact, yet we still expect everyone to work.
So we have lawyers, who are protected by the fact every country or state or province has its own laws... Shouldn't we have one set of laws for the whole planet?
We have one set of physics and electrical rules for the planet and look at the power that enables.
But we'll neve
Re: (Score:1)
I used to think this as well. Then I started having first-hand experience with "highly qualified" IT people from India.
I don't feel threatened anymore. The people I've worked with spend most of their time trying to talk other people into doing their work, and playing political games to advance their career. This is on top of the cultural issues in India with being unable to convey bad news or the answer "no".
Put another way - when's the last time you heard of a successful outsourcing program?
Re: (Score:2)
With outsourcing, you get what you pay for. Most outsourcing programs are cost-cutting measures. Companies go to the cheapest vendor available and expect comparable results. And when that does not happen, they feel comfortable and safe in the fact that "Indian IT personnel are less competent".
When you have a large number of IT graduates, you can expect a lot more incompetent graduates as well. And that is exactly what you get when you go to "IT sweatshops". Successful outsourcing programs would be found amo
wildly optimistic (Score:2)
...and even 5% of them are as smart as Saurabh.
Dream on. I'd bet this kid is at least in the top 0.3%, and maybe higher.
Re: (Score:1)
Because, with his parents' help, he copied a lego design off the Internet?
Nope. I was playing with lego + motors when I was 12 too, but that was pre-Internet when all we had were BBC Master 128s (which we had to push uphill, both ways etc.).
This kid will still succeed if he wants, but because he knows how to sell himself.
Common API (Score:2)
From watching the video he did not come up with the code for this device, but used code someone else wrote. So it is not like he did this from scratch.
Kudos for this kid for completing the project, but it is not quite as impressive as the article made it appear to be.
Obligatory Dilbert (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
sidiscide setback (Score:2)
An open invitation to extrapolate? Whoa daddy that. Fasten your air-bags, ladies and gentlemen.
Will the clever little rug rat grow up to become the William James of maker-space or William James Sidis of faker-disgrace?
so much wrong with this article (Score:1)
"Can you imagine what he'll be like at 18?"
Ability and age tend to not scale linearly. His abilities probably aren't going to change that much from here (he peaked early) and he's not going to amount to much if he can't handle advanced and abstract mathematics.
"...if we encourage young people to go into STEM"
TERRIBLE IDEA! There's already far too much supply for the lack of demand that exists, at least as measured in salaries. As long as we allow desperate, 3rd world coolie laborers to take our technolog
Encourage STEM? (Score:2)
I don't think the youngster needs any encouragement to go into STEM. For that matter, I don't think we need to encourage any young people to go into STEM - the field is crowded enough already.
However, for those whose true passion lies in that direction, just stay out of their way.