A lot of things humans can do, robots can do much faster — and solving a Rubik’s cube is no exception.
A contraption built by software engineers Jay Flatland and Paul Rose managed to consistently solve the famous 3-D combination puzzle in just over one second, as demonstrated in a video Flatland uploaded earlier this month to YouTube.
The robot's main components consist of a series of cube-turning stepper motors, a 3-D printed frame, USB webcams and an Arduino chip — all hooked up to a Linux system. The cameras feed information to the computer system about the cube's state, and an algorithm spits out a set of moves to solve the cube very, very rapidly.
In the video, the robot solves a Rubik's cube in times ranging from 1.196 seconds to 1.019 seconds.
If verified, that would easily top the Guinness record for fastest robot to solve a Rubik's Cube — 3.253 seconds, set by a Cubestormer 3 smartphone-powered machine in March 2014.
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"We’re in the process right now of applying for an official world record," Flatland said in his video.
How does his robot compare to humans? The fastest non-robot time to solve a Rubik's Cube is 4.90 seconds, a record set by 14-year-old Lucas Etter of Kentucky last November.