Anyone around in the early 1980s remembers the pop culture phenomenon that was the Rubik's Cube. Introduced in 1980, the mechanical puzzle quickly became a source of pride—and a landmark challenge for teenagers looking to show off their puzzle-solving skills. Many public competitions were held to see how fast someone could solve the puzzle.
Now it turns out that a Lego robot can do it in just 12.5 seconds—with the help of an Android phone. At this week's ARM Techcon 2010 developer conference in Silicon Valley, a Lego Mindstorms robotics kit paired with an ARM RISC CPU-powered HTC Nexus One smartphone did just that, DeviceGuru.com reports. Most attempts landed in the 15 second range, requiring 20 or 21 moves each.
Here's a short (1:51) video showing a quick interview with Gilday as the Lego Mindstorms robot solves a puzzle for the camera. The phone itself is sitting in a slot at the top of the robot. DeveloperDave Gilday places the Rubik's Cube inside the robot, which then closes its arms around the puzzle and begins solving it:
he Nexus One was the one of the first Android phones to run a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, as well as the very first phone to run Android 2.1. Google has since discontinued the phone after poor sales, thanks to Google's unconventional (for the U.S., at least) sales and technical support setup. Many newer 1-GHz Android phones like the Droid X and the HTC Incredible would have no trouble running the same software, though.
Gilday's latest creation improves on a Nokia N95-powered earlier attempt back in 2006 that could solve the puzzle in about 25 seconds. Gilday attributes the improvements mainly to the Nexus One's much faster processor and 512MB of RAM, as opposed to the N95's 332-MHz processor and 64MB RAM.
[Source]
