Engineers developed a robotic hand?with human-like articulating fingers that can solve a Rubik's Cube with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in around three minutes.
Open AI
Developed by Shadow Robot Company, the robotic hand uses Open AI to learn from scratch how to use the hand. Later the AI taught itself how to solve the cube using trial-and-error techniques, also referred to as reinforcement learning, till it got it right.
Peter Welinder, one of the researchers on this project said in a conversation with New Scientist, "It starts from not knowing anything about how to move a hand or how a cube would react if you push on the sides or on the faces."
The AI prevents making mistakes with the help of a point-scoring system where it would give itself one point for one correct manoeuvre (like twisting the sides or making the right move) and vice versa.?
Visual sensors, along with a cube-solving algorithm gave AI instructions about what moves to make so that the AI could focus more on the physical moves necessary.
The AI was programmed in such a way that it tried to increase its score every time. According to the researchers, fine-tuning the AI was challenging because of multiple points of contact between hand and object that are necessary to solve a Rubik's cube.
The AI learnt from its mistakes (like accidentally flipping the cube more) and took its sweet time to get it right, just like a human being.?
Peter stated that timing for solving the cube was dependent on the complexity of the patterns on the cube.?
The best time clocked by the robot for solving the cube was around three minutes. While it is nowhere close to the world record made by Felix Zemdegs of 4.22 seconds, what's important to note here is that he used two hands for this, whereas the robot is single-handed. However, the best single-handed time was achieved by Max Park at just 9.42 seconds.?
Representative Image: Pixabay
Now you might be wondering why does the robot solving this Rubik's cube in 3 minutes is an achievement. For starters, this AI learnt to solve the cube on its own, without any programing pertaining to Rubik's cube. It taught itself to finally get this timing, and it will get better with more practice.?
The researchers wish this hand can be further trained to create origami and conduct other basic tasks.?