With bits of wood and bare rubber bands, the young Hungarian Professor Ernő Rubik created a small prototype cube that went on to become the world’s most popular toy.
It was originally intended as a basic teaching model to demonstrate three-dimensional geometry to his design students at the Budapest College of Applied Arts. True to its first name, the ingenious “Magic Cube” ended up a hit selling more than 350 million times after it slipped through the Iron Curtain. The complex mechanical puzzle continues to fascinate and frustrate fans who frown and fight to figure out the one solution in some 43 quintillion, or a mind-numbing 43,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations.
On the classic Rubik’s Cube, each of the six solid coloured faces is covered by nine stickers, rotating on a central axis. I struggled with borrowed cubes, argued with friends, neglected homework, chores and sleep, and years later watched with amusement and some gratification as my two children tried to twist the sides into elusive uniformity. Before long, though, they were able to view video guides and learn about the white cross, turn corners and manage middle layers.
Enjoying a revival since the online sharing of strategies through public platforms like Youtube, the toy now has popular sites such as Rubiks.com which promotes international speed cubing events. Back in 1974, the young Professor sought to work out the structural problem of moving the sections independently without the entire mechanism falling apart. An astounded Rubik only realised what an enigma he had invented when he scrambled the coloured cube and could not restore each of the six faces to display a particular colour. “It was a code I myself had invented!” he wrote later, “Yet I could not read it.” It took him a month to refine a breakthrough by rearranging each side’s corners.
The current record for the fastest speed cube time by a human being is 3.47 seconds by the Chinese player Yusheng Du, who beat Australian Feliks Zemdegs by 0.75 seconds at the biennial World Championships held in China last year. Chinese companies were quick to develop even tougher cubes, following the expiration of Rubik’s patent in 2000 with the game drawing growing interest from teenagers in that country. Feliks also holds the record for the quickest one-handed solve of 6.88 seconds, and Jakub Kipa from Poland completes the challenge with his feet in an impressive 20.57 seconds. Yet the finest can only do it in about an average of 50 moves.
As Guyana battles on to find a new Elections Commission (GECOM) Chairman, and the caretaker coalition Government feuds with the main Opposition party over this and the serious implications of recent rulings by the Caribbean Court of Justice, it seems like we are locked in our own peculiar torment of a national Rubik’s cube.
It is preposterous and puzzling that from a population of at least 800 000 and a significant diaspora, the two sides cannot reach agreement on even lists of proper candidates much less a suitable GECOM chief. The ever-divided two main parties are apparently seeking to consider as many unlikely combinations as the Cube and take twice as long given the ruling administration’s much publicised problems with simple mathematics. Meanwhile, the ship of state is beginning to list and the passengers are confounded over their continuing crosses, while begging for any intelligent intervention artificial or natural, scarce as the latter appears to be in our prominent politicians.
This week, the University of California at Irvine (UCI) announced that an artificial intelligence (AI) system, DeepCubeA has managed to solve the Rubik’s Cube in a mere fraction of a second, beating our best and taking far less time than reading these words. Programmed by UCI’s computer scientists and mathematicians, the algorithm achieved success on its own without any specific domain knowledge or in-game coaching from humans.
“This is no simple task considering that the cube has completion paths numbering in the billions but only one goal state – each of six sides displaying a solid colour – which apparently can’t be found through random moves,” the University acknowledged in a statement.
For a study published in Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers demonstrated that DeepCubeA solved all test configurations, finding the shortest path about 60 percent of the time.
“Artificial intelligence can defeat the world’s best human chess and Go players, but some of the more difficult puzzles, such as the Rubik’s Cube, had not been solved by computers, so we thought they were open for AI approaches,” said senior author Pierre Baldi, UCI Distinguished Professor of Computer Science. “The solution to the Rubik’s Cube involves more symbolic, mathematical and abstract thinking, so a deep learning machine that can crack such a puzzle is getting closer to becoming a system that can think, reason, plan and make decisions.”
The researchers were interested in understanding how and why the AI machine made its moves and how long it took to perfect its method. They started with a computer simulation of a completed puzzle and then mixed up the cube. Once the code was in place and running, DeepCubeA trained in isolation for two days, solving an increasingly difficult series of combinations. “It learned on its own,” Baldi disclosed.
“Our AI takes about 20 moves, most of the time solving it in the minimum number of steps,” Baldi said. “Right there, you can see the strategy is different, so my best guess is that the AI’s form of reasoning is completely different from a human’s.”
The UCI project relies on a neural network, a set of algorithms designed to mimic how the human brain processes information. Machine learning techniques also allowed AI to learn by identifying patterns and using inference.
The veteran computer scientist said such projects aim to build the next generation of AI systems. Whether they know it or not, people are touched by artificial intelligence every day through apps such as Siri and Alexa and recommendation engines working behind the scenes of their favourite online services, UCI pointed out.
“But these systems are not really intelligent; they’re brittle, and you can easily break or fool them,” Baldi said. “How do we create advanced AI that is smarter, more robust and capable of reasoning, understanding and planning? This work is a step toward this hefty goal.”
The UCI algorithm is not the fastest non-human conqueror of the Rubik’s Cube. In Germany, researchers built a robot in 2016 named Sub1Reloaded that solved the puzzle in 0.637 second. Last year, that record was broken by a new robot developed by a pair of Americans from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo. It took a lightning-fast 0.38 seconds. Video at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OZu9gjQJUQs
As the outstanding late British Professor, Stephen Hawking warned in a 2017 interview with the online magazine Wired, “The genie is out of the bottle. We need to move forward on artificial intelligence development but we also need to be mindful of its very real dangers. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans.”
ID recommends that given the current impasse, Guyanese should do away with polarising polls and just ask DeepCubeA to appoint the best patriots to head the country’s Election Commission, the next Presidency and the Opposition.
