Blink and miss! Robot solves Rubik''s cube in 0.38 seconds

Boston, March 12 

Scientists have created a robot that has possibly set a new world record by solving the Rubik's cube in 0.38 seconds.

The current Guinness World Record for a Rubik's cube solved by a robot is 0.637 seconds.

The robot was built by Ben Katz, a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and software developer Jared Di Carlo, who posted the video of the robot in action.

"The machine can definitely go faster, but the tuning process is really time consuming since debugging needs to be done with the high speed camera, and mistakes often break the cube or blow up the transistor," Katz wrote in the blog post.

"We noticed that all of the fast Rubik's Cube solvers were using stepper motors and thought that we could do better if we used better motors," Di Carlo wrote in a separate blog post.

The 0.38 seconds starts from the moment the keypress is registered on the computer, to when the last face is flipped, Katz said in his blog.

It includes image capture and computation time, as well as actually moving the cube. The motion time is about 335 millisecond, and the remaining time is that of image acquisition and computation.

The robot had difficulty identifying the difference between the red and orange sides of the cube, so the researchers blackened the orange squares with a marker pen.

"For the time being, Jared and I have both lost interest in playing the tuning game, but we might come back to it eventually and shave off another 100 ms or so," Katz said.

As of now, the record has not been independently verified by Guinness, so the title for the fastest robot to solve a Rubik's Cube remains with 'Sub1 Reloaded' built by Albert Beer of Germany. - PTI