Apr 10
If you’ve reconciled your childhood frustrations and animosities towards the Rubik’s Cube, you might be happy to hear there’s now yet another way
Mar 15
Cubestormer 3 is a robot with just one job—to solve a scrambled Rubik’s Cube as swiftly as possible. Today, at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK, it did the task in an astounding 3.253 seconds, faster than any human or robot in the world. Just look at that thing go.
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Mar 13
What are some of the hardest puzzles that you have played with in the past, especially during your younger days? I am quite sure that for many of us, it is the Rubik’s Cube that has confounded us for a fair number of years, until frustration reaches a level where we rearrange the colored stickers manually and consider it “solved”. Well, robots are pretty good at tasks such as the Rubik’s Cube, which is why ARM has stepped forward to announce that it has managed to come up with one of the components in the CUBESTORMER 3 robot, which will include LEGO bricks as well as a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone with the goal of breaking the Rubik’s Cube speed record.
CUBESTORMER 3 Intends To Solve Rubik’s Cube original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Mar 08
I never solved the Rubik’s Cube, so when I see this dude breaking the world record for solving six cubes of increasing complexity—2×2, 3×3, 4×4, 5×5, 6×6 and 7×7—in just 6 minutes and 23 seconds, I just can think two things: "That’s insane" and "I’m useless."
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Mar 04
I don’t have the brain capacity or the finger dexterity or the lung capacity to do any of these things because I am not a genius fish human. Kevin Hays, on the other hand, is probably a fish human. Powered by the brain of a computer. With the fingers of robots.
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Dec 22
How good are you at solving Rubik’s cubes? I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m particularly bad at it. In fact, I have yet to successfully solve a 3×3 cube and I’ve been trying for five years and counting already.
If the usual handheld cubes are starting to bore you and you happen to be in Austria, then you might want to drop by the Ars Electronica center in Linz. The building’s facade is actually covered in 1,085 glass panes that are illuminated by 95,000 color-changing LED lights. It has been used by a number of artists as a medium for their work.
The latest is Javier Lloret, who turned the building into a game. Specifically, he turned it into a giant Rubik’s cube, and he’s calling it the Puzzle Facade.
The interface-cube holds electronic components to keep track of rotation and orientation. This data is sent via Bluetooth to a computer that runs the Puzzle Facade designed software. This software changes the lights and color of the large-scale Ars Electronica’s media facade in correlation to the handheld interface-cube.
Puzzle Facade is made more challenging since the player can only see two sides at a time. However, it’s not really a huge factor since the player can flip and rotate and interface cube.
The Puzzle Facade is part of Lloret’s thesis for the Interface Culture master program at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz.
[via C|NET]
Dec 19
Solving a regular Rubik’s Cube is already a daunting task for most of us, and that’s just 54 colored squares you have to rearrange. Can you imagine if someone dropped this monstrosity into your lap? Completely scrambled and out of order? Resorting all of those colored rectangles would take a lifetime—and restickering it? Just as long.
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Dec 04
Most of the videos you can find of Rubik’s Cube-manipulating robots are purpose-built to solve
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Dec 04
If you were walking down the street and someone handed you a completely colorless Rubik’s cube and asked if you wanted to have a go, chances are you’d hand it back with a quick, "nahhhh, I’m cool." And you would just keep on walking. BUT! What if you looked up and saw the device was actually controlling an entire, rainbow-hued building all lit up and shining right in front of you?
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Dec 04
You might be surprised to see this particular building when strolling down the street in Linz, Austria, especially when it resembles that of a massive Rubik’s Cube. In fact, it might even lead the more imaginative among you to figure out that this is some sort of Autobot or Decepticon in disguise come to live, but in reality, this hunk of concrete has been turned into a massive Rubik’s Cube. In fact, there is a possibility that you might be handed a tiny, all-white cube which will give you the opportunity to be a public hero – that is, by manipulating the small, all-white cube in order to solve the projected Rubik’s Cube on the building itself. The added pressure of public eyes scrutinizing your every move might be too much for some, I suppose.
This is one neat idea all in all, and it so happens to be the work of artist and designer Javier Lloret. The thing is, solving a Rubik’s Cube is not all that easy if you do not have that logical mind, although there are tutorials online which would be able to let you know how to approach the problem, and with enough practice, you would also be able to solve a Rubik’s cube in your sleep. It is a good thing that whether you can solve this puzzle in public or not, the man (and woman) on the street will still be treated to a dazzling light show.
Building Turns Into One Gigantic Rubik’s Cube original content from Ubergizmo. 
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