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WATCH: A robot powered by Samsung’s Galaxy S4 solves a Rubik’s Cube in world-record time

Callum Tennent
March 17, 2014

It’s good to know that the world’s brightest scientific minds are putting their collective abilities to good use. Design technicians David Gilday and Mike Dobson are the brains behind the Cubestormer 3 – a Lego robot powered by a smartphone built to solve the Rubik’s Cube. Obviously.

‘Solving’ doesn’t really do justice to what the Cubestormer 3 does, though. This weekend the machine completed a Rubik’s Cube in a world record-shattering time of just 3.253 seconds. The previous record was held by its predecessor, the Cubestormer 2 – a lackadaisical 5.27 seconds. That may not sound like a huge difference, but an improvement of roughly 39% is pretty astonishing.

The Cubestormer 3 is powered by a Samsung Galaxy S4, for reasons beyond the comprehension of What Mobile’s intellectually inferior brains. All we know is that they utilised the handset’s octa-core ARM Cortex-A15/Cortex-A7 processor setup. It seems that when you combine it with Lego’s Mindstorm actuators you get a pretty powerful logic computer. The phone analyses the layout of the cube, calculates the most efficient way to go about solving it, and then tells its robotic body what to do.

It’s all very impressive, in a weird sort of way, but what we found most impressive was the fact that a computer designed with the sole purpose of solving the Rubik’s Cube only beat the human world-record by 2.32 seconds. If only they could find a way to put Mats Valk‘s brain inside a Lego robot…

Check out the footage of the Cubestormer 3’s record-breaking performance above.

About the Author

Callum Tennent

International playboy/tech journalist.

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