Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/11/watch-a-robot-solve-a-rubiks-c.html
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Sounds like a bad date.
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Nice, but didn’t take very many moves to solve, likely not really “scrambled” much at all.
It would be interesting to let it run from random number generated output for a few minutes to get it really scrambled, then see how long it took to solve.
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Apparently the most scrambled a cube can be is 20 moves.
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That is awesome! You just won the intarwebs for me! 
(Huh, seems they updated in 2014 to 26 )
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So we have religious differences then?
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I think the 26 is for rotations of 90deg. The 20 also counts rotations of 180deg as one move.
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Only if you’re a fundamentalist, 20 is Old Testament, 26 is New Testament. 
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It’s 20 moves if you take all the Catholic and Jewish moves out. 26 if you leave them in.
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Do I really need a Rubik’s cube solving machine as part of my life?
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Just imagine how much more respect America could have right now if you’d elected this thing as your president
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Also the 'bot is able to turn both the top and bottom (or left and right) faces simultaneously, while holding the center still, combining two moves into one in a way that would be difficult for a human being to achieve.
In the early days of cube mathematics, two camps emerged on how to measure the difficulty of a position. West coast and Stanford mathematicians, free thinkers all, tended to prefer the half-turn metric,where any twist of any face, whether 90 degrees, 180 degrees, or 270 degrees counted as a single move. The east coast crowd, including MIT, tended to prefer the rigor of the quarter-turn metric, where a half-turn counted as two moves, since of course it could be accomplished by two consecutive quarter turns.
And now you know the real East-West war that lead to Tupac’s death
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I, for one, welcome our Rubik’s Cube solving Overlords.
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Yes!
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Well, it would be a little limited in what it could do, but what it could do, it could do well!
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Milliseconds
Bah!
I once tried to get my children interested in the cube, so I learned to solve it.
In milliseconds.
About 300000 of them.
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That makes sense I mean, how many solved cubes are there? One, or six?
One seems the best answer to me, given the group rotational symmetry. So I vote for 20, not 26.
Democratic mathematics!
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This is why I never got interested in solving the thing. I thought, “A robot could do that in half a second.” They are almost there!
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