A housemate of mine at university had a project to build Rubik’s cube solving machine with a group as part of his course.
The “human hands are actually really good and hard to replace mechanically” would be a sentiment he could sympathise with. All other aspects of the project (the solving code, the camera data interpretation) were negligible in comparison to making hands that could turn the faces they wanted to turn, and turn them in increments of 90 degrees (more or less causes the next turn to “jam up” the cube). I think in the end they got it to the point it would usually work with a brand new cube that had never been used before, but after a few hundred moves had been made on any given cube the stiffness of the turns would have changed in an inconsistent way and jams would occur.
I’d say that anecdote illustrates that human hands are not very good at the problem of Rubiks Cubing, if it is a reasonable task to assign in a single course. No matter how much speedcubers practice, they’re not going to be able to solve a cube in <0.4s. Looking at the slo-mo version, it seems like it might be able to go even faster, but it’s approaching the physical limits of the regular cubes not exploding… (WP tells me the human all-time record stands at >7x slower.) Even with unmodified cubes they’re still a lot faster (using Legos, of all things). Such high-speed robotics is a good example of why chaos doesn’t matter.
A housemate of mine at university had a project to build Rubik’s cube solving machine with a group as part of his course.
The “human hands are actually really good and hard to replace mechanically” would be a sentiment he could sympathise with. All other aspects of the project (the solving code, the camera data interpretation) were negligible in comparison to making hands that could turn the faces they wanted to turn, and turn them in increments of 90 degrees (more or less causes the next turn to “jam up” the cube). I think in the end they got it to the point it would usually work with a brand new cube that had never been used before, but after a few hundred moves had been made on any given cube the stiffness of the turns would have changed in an inconsistent way and jams would occur.
I’d say that anecdote illustrates that human hands are not very good at the problem of Rubiks Cubing, if it is a reasonable task to assign in a single course. No matter how much speedcubers practice, they’re not going to be able to solve a cube in <0.4s. Looking at the slo-mo version, it seems like it might be able to go even faster, but it’s approaching the physical limits of the regular cubes not exploding… (WP tells me the human all-time record stands at >7x slower.) Even with unmodified cubes they’re still a lot faster (using Legos, of all things). Such high-speed robotics is a good example of why chaos doesn’t matter.