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Rubik's Cube

GNC

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What the...?

Michel Gondry Solves a Rubiks Cube with his Feet

youtube.com/watch?v=WiQXgmVVGNA
Link is dead. No archived version found.


He's well known for trick photography, but do any Rubik's Cube experts have an opinion on this?
 
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I haven't done the cube for years, but by the look of it I'd say he scrambled the cube in a systematic way: all you do is twist the right hand block clockwise through 90 degrees, turn the cube laterally or vertically and do the same action again for a set number of times. To solve the cube you merely turn the right hand block anti-clockwise and turn the cube in the opposite direction for the same number of times - so long as you remember the "route" it's dead easy.

So I'd say he is using his feet, which is pretty cool in itself, but just remembering how he got the cube into that state in the first place :).
 
The video is reversed. The guy 'walking backwards' behind him is a give away as is the exacting manner on which Michel shows the finished cube (actually the start of the vid).
 
Frobush said:
The video is reversed. The guy 'walking backwards' behind him is a give away as is the exacting manner on which Michel shows the finished cube (actually the start of the vid).
...or that.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
'Driven mad' Rubik's nut weeps on solving cube... after 26 years of trying
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:51 AM on 12th January 2009

Puzzle fan Graham Parker breathed a sigh of relief as he finally solved his Rubik’s Cube – after 26 years.

The father-of-one, 45, has been trying to solve the riddle of the cube since buying one in 1983, enduring wrist problems, backache and sleepless nights.

The builder, of Portchester, Hampshire, said: ‘It has driven me mad over the years - it felt like it had taken over my life.

'I have missed important events to stay in and solve it and I would lay awake at night thinking about it.

'Friends have offered to solve it for me and I know that you can find solutions on the web but I just had to do it myself.'

Graham finally managed to conquer his personal Everest after more than 27,400 hours of tireless pursuit, and says it was 'all worth it'.
'When I clicked that last bit into place and each face was a solid colour I wept. I cannot tell you what a relief it was to finally solve it.'

Long-suffering wife Jean, 47, said the cube has frequently put a strain on their marriage, causing blazing rows between the pair.

Jean even admits at times it has felt three has been three people in their marriage for the past 26 years.

'When I met Graham he was already obsessed with the cube - spending hours on it every day,' she said.

'I have often thought about getting rid of it but I knew he would not rest until he had solved it, which thankfully he has done.'

Donald's success has reached the governing body for Rubik's Cube competitions, the World Cube Association (WCA).

Ray Hodgkin of the WCA said: 'I think this is definitely the longest it has ever taken someone to complete a Cube.

'I am impressed by Donald's dedication - the Rubik's Cube can be a very frustrating thing. The WCA would like to congratulate him on his achievement.'

The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor Erno Rubik but was originally called the Magic Cube.

More than 300 million have been sold worldwide and there are an astonishing 43 quintillion different possible configurations and only one solution.

Support group 'Cubaholics' was set up in 1980 to help addicts kick the habit and Rubik's cubes are so compulsive they have given rise to two medical conditions - Cubist's Thumb and Rubik's Wrist.

Erik Akkersdijk of the Netherlands holds the record for a single solve with a time of 7.08 seconds.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... rying.html
 
Rise of the robogeeks
by Michael Brooks

A robot called 'Cubinator' solving a Rubik's cube during the 2007 Rubik's Cube World Championship (Image: Bela Szandelszky/Rex Features)

IN December, philosopher and artificial intelligence expert Aaron Sloman announced his intention to create nothing less than a robot mathematician. He reckons he has identified a key component of how humans develop mathematical talent. If he's right, it should be possible to program a machine to be as good as us at mathematics, and possibly better.

This is no mad quest, insists Sloman, of the University of Birmingham in the UK. "Human brains don't work by magic, so whatever it is they do should be doable in suitably designed machines," he says.

Sloman's creature is not meant to be a mathematical genius capable of advancing the frontiers of mathematical knowledge: his primary aim, outlined in the journal Artifical Intelligence (vol 172, p2015), is to use such a machine to improve our understanding of where our mathematical ability comes from. Nevertheless, it is possible that such a robot could take us beyond what mathematicians have achieved so far. Forget robot vacuum cleaners and android waitresses; we're talking about a machine that could spawn a race of cyber-nerds capable of creating entirely new forms of mathematics.

The field of artificial intelligence has promised much before, of course. Early researchers thought it might open a fast-track to understanding consciousness, and there were claims that artificially intelligent computers and robots would change the world. The truth has been more prosaic. AI has done some clever things, such as give us great chess players and voice recognition software, but it hasn't delivered a revolution.

But when it comes to mathematics, we can't rule one out yet, says Alison Pease, who researches the philosophy of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Pease teaches computers to do mathematics using AI programs, and thinks a computer really could astonish its programmer with a new mathematical insight. "Ours hasn't yet, but there is no reason why one shouldn't in the future," she says.

The first concrete step towards this scenario came with a program written by Simon Colton, now at Imperial College London. The program was named HR, in honour of the mathematicians Godfrey Harold Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. It looked for "interesting" sequences of numbers (New Scientist, 24 February 2001, p 13).

Some of HR's discoveries have even been published - and HR, rather than Colton, got the credit. Though they might not look like cutting-edge advances, they could yet prove important. "I always refer to HR's work in number theory as recreational mathematics, but things that look insignificant can end up being hugely significant and interesting," Colton says.

Pease and her colleagues Alan Smaille and Markus Guhe have recently taken things further. In their Edinburgh computing laboratory they have been running virtual mathematics conferences, populated entirely by digital mathematicians (see "Reinventing the conjecture"). So where might that lead?

All the way to significant new mathematics, Sloman hopes. His idea is that our key mathematical capabilities are formed in childhood. So rather than engineering a fully fledged mathematician's brain, Sloman thinks we should build a robot with a child-like brain and let it grow into its mathematical destiny.

There's just one problem. How do we know which of our childhood capabilities equip us for a life of juggling numbers?

Sloman is busy gathering clues. The answer, he reckons, lies in the spatial awareness skills that children must acquire in order to negotiate their world: skills such as knowing that a toy train pushed into a tunnel will come out the other side. Or that a jigsaw puzzle piece fits its gap only when correctly oriented. Or that the number of toys on the sofa does not depend on the order in which you count them.

From the minds of babes

You might be surprised to learn, for instance, that you grasped the topological concept called "the transitivity of containment" when you were still a toddler. Stacking cups, one inside the other, you learned that the small cup would fit not only in the medium-sized cup, but also inside the big one.

Transitivity of containment, like other geometrical and topological concepts, is learned through experience. "There are hundreds, if not thousands more examples of things a child learns empirically, that are later seen to be theorems in topology, geometry and arithmetic," Sloman says.

At some point, children make that jump for themselves. As toddlers, we soon translate our experiences into general theorems which we use to make predictions.

Take the train-through-a-tunnel example. By repeated experiences like this, toddlers learn the basic properties of rigid rods. That's why a 3-year-old carrying a long broom handle can negotiate a narrow corridor, turn a corner at the end without getting the broom handle caught in the vertical bars of a stair-gate, then make adjustments so that the handle will go through the next doorway. "There is a switch from learning empirically to realising it has 'simply got to be like that'," Sloman says.

And here is the key to the emergence of the mathematical mind. "The mechanisms that make that possible in a child are related to what makes it possible for them to go on to become a mathematician," Sloman says. "A lot of abstract maths has its roots in our ability to think about space and time, processes, and interactions between processes and structures."

Sloman has gone back to basics, to watch how children learn to navigate the world around them. He is building an archive of observations of children performing pseudo-mathematical tasks. These navigational and object manipulation skills - or at least the ability to acquire them quickly - must be encoded in the genome, Sloman reckons. And that means they could be encoded in a machine.

Sloman is still a long way from designing his robot toddler. Once he has catalogued the abilities of children at various stages of development, he still has to work out how to understand the mathematical implications of those abilities, then represent them in some form of computer code. "Information needs to be encoded in some form in order to be usable," he says. The gargantuan scale of the task means his aims are necessarily modest: at this stage he is simply trying to show a link between spatial manipulations and the basics of mathematics. Anything more would be a bonus. But just how big could that bonus be? Could a robot mathematician really do something interesting?

"In principle, yes, absolutely," Pease says. But, she adds, the story-so-far tempers her optimism. "Of all the scientific and mathematical discovery programs I've looked at, nothing has yet made a big discovery." At the very least, she says, that means there is a long way to go.

Colton thinks there is every reason to believe computers could produce something interesting to mathematicians. "Software is already producing theorems of value to maths," he points out. "Not of huge value, I admit - but then the average student or mathematician isn't producing anything of huge value either."

He and his team are convinced that computers can be genuinely creative. "Creativity is a very loaded word: people like to think it's a uniquely human attribute," he says. "The fact is, computers doing maths are more likely to be creative than, say, an undergraduate student, in many ways."

Others are sceptical of this view. Computers are a useful tool, says Rafael Núñez an expert on mathematical cognition at the University of California, San Diego, but the sense that computers can invent mathematics is an illusion. Though it looks like we can make progress by programming machines to do mathematics, he reckons there can be nothing in these machines that isn't pre-ordained by human mathematical concepts. "For me, it's like computing the decimal places of pi," Núñez says. "Once we have decided what the right rules are, we're just using the computer to crunch numbers."

Sloman thinks Núñez's view is too narrow. He points to "evolutionary algorithms" as a reason for optimism. This innovation allows a computer to evolve its own programs by producing lots of them, testing them against a goal criteria, and then selecting and "interbreeding" the best ones. It has allowed computers do things that nobody programmed them to do. "In some cases no human even knows how they do what they do," Sloman says. Aerospace and automobile designers have been using evolutionary algorithms since the late 1980s to optimise aircraft parts and streamline their designs. Even city traders are using them to buy and sell shares (New Scientist, 28 July 2007, p 26).

Evolution has a few million years head start on us in developing brilliant mathematicians, of course, but at least we're now in the race. "Our big discovery would be how do we do mathematics, rather than how do we write a program that can generate really new mathematics," says Pease. "But hopefully one would lead on from the other."

Reinventing the conjecture

The traditional view of mathematics sees it as a set of some eternally existing rules that describe the universe. Doing maths involves exploring this abstract, ethereal domain.

Though appealing to many, this notion of mathematicians as intrepid explorers is nothing more than a romantic myth, according to Alison Pease of the University of Edinburgh, UK. "Maths is not discovery," she says. "It's a thing that we invent."

It is something that her computers can invent too, she insists. Pease runs an AI program called HRL, which puts together "agents" in a student-teacher relationship.

The students are programmed to take some input information, make inferences from it and try to assess just how "interesting" those inferences are. If sufficiently interesting, the teacher gets involved, calling a group brainstorm designed to develop the ideas further.

One of HRL's early successes was the independent invention of a mathematical proposition called Goldbach's conjecture. One of the students was given the concept of integers and divisors, and instructed to use these to play around with the integers 1 to 10, looking for interesting relationships. A second student had the same concepts and instructions, but played with the integers 11 to 20.

Student two generated two new concepts: "even numbers" and "the sum of two primes". Then it generated a conjecture: that all even numbers can be expressed as the sum of two primes. It thought this was interesting, and sent its work to the teacher to be placed on the agenda for discussion.

The response was positive. "The teacher sent a request for modifications to this conjecture, and student one found the counterexample," Pease says. That counterexample is the number 2: the conjecture was modified to "all even numbers except 2 are the sum of two primes".

The fact that Christian Goldbach came up with this still unproven conjecture in 1742 makes it a little less impressive, but the point is made. Even if computers are a few centuries behind, it seems that machines really can do what human mathematicians do.

Michael Brooks is writer based in Lewes, UK, and author of 13 Things That Don't Make Sense (Profile)

www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126971 ... geeks.html
 
Rubik's Cube: Six sides, 54 squares. Just seconds to solve
It is 30 this year, a decade older than most challengers for the speedcubing crown. Emily Dugan watches the UK's fastest fingers
Sunday, 7 November 2010

A hush descends, interrupted only by the clickety-click of 58 pairs of hands frantically rearranging coloured squares. This is the UK's Rubik's Cube Open Speedcubing Championship. Competitors from around the world are gathered at Bristol's Armada conference centre to show their six-sided puzzle prowess.

The Rubik's Cube is this year celebrating its 30th anniversary. More than 350 million of the puzzles have been sold worldwide and the toy has been experiencing a resurgence thanks to a vogue for Eighties kitsch.

The 58 "cubers", as they like to be known, are keeping their hands nimble ahead of the first round. In front of them a row of four "scramblers" rearrange cubes to an identical (and top secret) unsolved state, generated by computer ahead of the contest.

Among the first competitors to take a seat is Breandan Vallance from Glasgow. The pony-tailed 18-year-old is world and UK speedcubing champion, with an official average fastest time of 9.9 seconds. :shock:

Considering there are apparently 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations of its coloured squares, it is baffling to imagine how anyone could solve the cube in under a day – let alone 10 seconds.

So what's the secret? "Well, it's pretty easy, you think of it in pieces rather than stickers". So far so simple. "Then there are 57 orientation algorithms and 21 permutation algorithms." This is probably the point at which most people decide it's simpler to take the stickers off and put them back in the right place.

He barely looks at the cube, and his hands blur as if on fast-forward. He secures his place in the final with an average of 10.6 seconds – more than half a second ahead of his opponents. Unlike the world championship title, which earned Mr Vallance €5,000, today's prize is just a trophy, but he's taking it no less seriously.

Like him, most of the contestants are males in their late teens or early twenties, whose skin, hair and clothes suggest they spend a little too much time in their bedrooms. There are exceptions. Charlotte Cooper, 22, one of only three women in the contest, is Europe's best female cuber, with a time of 18.53 seconds.

Ryder Stringer, seven, from Ilfracombe, Devon, is the youngest entrant. He completes it in just over a minute. He has entered alongside his sister Summer, nine, and his brother Louis, 12, who taught himself and his home-schooled siblings four months ago and can complete the puzzle in 22 seconds.

While the "ordinary" speedcubing event may be sewn up by Mr Vallance, a far more difficult challenge is harder to predict. As if solving the cube with your eyes open isn't hard enough, 12 of the contestants are taking it on blindfolded. They are allowed to memorise the cube before putting on an airline eye mask and rearranging it. 8)

Joey Gouly, a 20-year-old computer science student at Manchester University, is the favourite to win, with Britain's fastest blindfolded time of 1 minute 6 seconds. Dropping the puzzle after just over a minute, he throws off his mask and looks triumphant. Then he looks down. The puzzle is still jumbled and his attempt is void. He looks crestfallen: "That was my best chance at a win. There's no point in the main event: no one stands a chance against Breandon."

Mr Gouly's fears are confirmed as Mr Vallance takes the medal with an average speed of 10.4 seconds – almost a second faster than runner-up Rowan Kinneavy, 19, from Aberdeen.

But he has not totally maintained his top position. His UK record for the single fastest solving was broken by Mr Kinneavy, who succeeded in 7.71 seconds in a heat, smashing the world champion's best of 9.28 seconds. "It feels great," he says. "I've done it in five seconds in my bedroom before, but this is different."

Mr Gouly also fails to take the blindfold crown, losing out to Daniel Sheppard, 21, who is doing a maths master's at Oxford University. He completed it in 1 minute 58 seconds.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/th ... 27350.html
 
This never ceases to amaze me.

But then, Im not much good at maths, once you understand the formula, its easy.
 
Cubestormer 3 robot breaks Rubik's Cube world record

Cubestormer 3 robot

The record was set at the Big Bang fair at Birmingham's NEC

A robot has broken the world record for the fastest solving of a Rubik's Cube.

Cubestormer 3, designed by David Gilday and Mike Dobson, recorded a time of 3.253 seconds at Birmingham's NEC.

The previous record of 5.27 seconds was set by the same design team three years ago.

Craig Glenday, editor in chief of Guinness World Records, was at the NEC to verify the claim as well as two other records set by Mr Gilday at the Big Bang Science and engineering fair.

The robot uses a mobile phone to take pictures of the Rubik's Cube and then works out the quickest way to solve it, using four robotic hands.

'Bit of fun'
The robot is powered by an ARM processor. Mr Gilday, a principal engineer at ARM, and Mr Dobson took 18 months to design and build the robot in their spare time.

Mr Gilday said the attempt was "a bit of fun".

"Our real focus is to demonstrate what can be achieved with readily available technology to inspire young minds into taking a greater interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics," he said.

"We knew Cubestormer 3 had the potential to beat the existing record but with the robot performing physical operations quicker than the human eye can see there's always an element of risk.

"Our big challenge now is working out if it's possible to make it go even faster."

Cubestormer 3 robot

The robot was designed by the two engineers in their spare time

Mr Gilday also set new new records during the Big Bang fair for the fastest completion of 4x4x4 and 9x9x9 cubes, which are considerably more complicated than the classic 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-26561904
 
A robot has just solved the Rubik's Cube in 0.637 seconds ... we're all doomed

 
Man makes world's largest rubiks cube . ...

This fellow's (Tony Fisher's) Guinness record was broken by a science museum in Canada. Now Fisher has reclaimed the record with a new cube that measures 6 feet 7 inches on each of its sides.

British man retakes world's largest Rubik's cube record


A British puzzle enthusiast recaptured his Guinness World Records title by building a Rubik's cube that measures 6 feet and 7 inches on each side.

Tony Fisher, who held the record for the world's largest Rubik's cube from 2016 until 2018, said his latest creation took about 330 hours to build.

The result, a fully functional Rubik's cube that stands 6 feet, 7 inches tall, was enough to retake the record from the TELUS Spark science museum in Canada, which assembled a 5-foot, 6-inch Rubik's cube.

Fisher said his interest in puzzles began in 1980, when he received his first Rubik's cube at the age of 14. He made puzzle design his full-time job in 2010.

SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2020/0...argest-Rubiks-cube-record/5531586364888/?sl=1
 
Guinness has recognized a new record in which an 8-year-old Indian boy solved three cubes simultaneously, taking about 1.5 minutes.
8-year-old uses hands and feet to break Rubik's cube world record

An 8-year-old Rubik's cube enthusiast in India broke a Guinness World Record by solving three puzzles at once -- one in each hand and one with his feet -- in 1 minute and 29.97 seconds.

Atharva R Bhat of Bangalore, Karnataka, an avid speedcuber, broke the previous record by more than 6 seconds, Guinness said. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2021/0...at-Rubiks-cubes-hands-and-feet/2261616008348/

See Also: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.co...peedcuber-breaks-hands-and-feet-record-651933
 
Kids do have faster thinking processes than adults, I've said this for years.
 
This fellow's (Tony Fisher's) Guinness record was broken by a science museum in Canada. Now Fisher has reclaimed the record with a new cube that measures 6 feet 7 inches on each of its sides.
Fisher's latest cube has now been surpassed by a cube recently unveiled at a Hong Kong mall.
World's largest Rubik's cube assembled at Hong Kong mall

A mall in Hong Kong broke a Guinness World Record when it commissioned the building of a Rubik's cube measuring 8.2 feet on each side.

The Nina Mall in Hong Kong had a giant puzzle cube constructed on its premises ...

The functioning Rubik's cube measures 8 feet, 2.4 inches on each side.

The previous record-holder, created by British puzzle maker Tony Fisher, measured 6 feet and 7 inches on each side.
SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2021/0...ubiks-cube-Nina-Mall-Hong-Kong/5211624550104/
 
As if the Rubik's Cube stunts couldn't get any more surreal. This Colombian teen broke his own Guinness record for fastest solving of three separate Rubik's Cubes - while juggling them.


Colombian teen solves three Rubik's cubes while juggling

A coordinated Colombian 19-year-old broke his own world record by solving three Rubik's cubes in 4 minutes, 31.01 seconds -- while juggling them.

Angel Alvarado, who previously set the Guinness World Record at 4 minutes, 52.43 seconds in May 2021, broke his own record in Bogota, Guinness announced. ...

Alvarado said it took him five months of practice to learn how to solve a single cube while juggling, and four more months before he could efficiently solve three cubes while tossing them into the air. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2022/0...-Records-Rubiks-cubes-juggling/1151652725415/
 
Michel Gondry Solves a Rubiks Cube with his Feet
He's well known for trick photography, but do any Rubik's Cube experts have an opinion on this?
The video is reversed. The guy 'walking backwards' behind him is a give away as is the exacting manner on which Michel shows the finished cube (actually the start of the vid).

Here's a YouTube video explaining how Gondry apparently faked the foot-solving video ...

 
In the ongoing saga of obsessive cube-solving records ... This UK fellow solved almost 7,000 cubes in a 24 hour period - a new Guinness-certified record.
British 20-year-old solves 6,931 Rubik's cubes in 24 hours

A 20-year-old Rubik's cube enthusiast in Britain broke a Guinness World Record by solving 6,931 of the puzzles in 24 hours.

George Scholey livestreamed his attempt from a London hotel room as he took on the record for most rotating puzzle cubes solved in 24 hours. ...

Scholey, whose attempt was timed to coincide with Guinness World Records Day, solved 6,931 cubes in 24 hours, breaking the record of 5,800, which was set by Eric Limeback of Canada in 2013.

Scholey is the reigning cubing champion in Britain and is ranked as one of the top-rated speedcubers in the world by the World Cube Association.

"The hardest part of the record was hitting the 12 hours mark," Scholey told Guinness World Records. "I felt pretty drained and everyone else was so excited. ...

Scholey said he was disappointed to not make it to 7,000.

"Toward the end of the night I saw I was getting closer to 7,000, and I'm a bit annoyed I didn't get that result. But that's fine. I also took breaks, and it's an attempt over 24 hours," he said. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2022/1...g-puzzle-cubes-solved-24-hours/8171668115276/
 
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