The human record for solving a Rubik's Cube has been smashed by an artificial intelligence. The bot, called DeepCubeA, completed the popular puzzle in a fraction of a second - much faster than the quickest humans. While algorithms have previously been developed specifically to solve the Rubik's Cube, this is the first time it has done without any specific domain knowledge or in-game coaching from humans. It brings researchers a step closer to creating an advanced AI system that can think like a human. "The solution to the Rubik's Cube involves more symbolic, mathematical and abstract thinking," said senior author Professor Pierre Baldi, a computer scientist at the University of California, Irvine.

Researchers have developed an AI algorithm which can solve a Rubik's cube in a fraction of a second, according to a study published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. The system, known as DeepCubeA, uses a form of machine learning which teaches itself how to play in order to crack the puzzle without being specifically coached by humans. "Artificial intelligence can defeat the world's best human chess and Go players, but some of the more difficult puzzles, such as the Rubik's Cube, had not been solved by computers, so we thought they were open for AI approaches," Pierre Baldi, one of the developers of the algorithm and computer scientist from the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. According to Baldi, the latest development could herald a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) deep-learning systems which are more advanced than those used in commercially available applications such as Siri and Alexa. "These systems are not really intelligent; they're brittle, and you can easily break or fool them," Baldi said.

An artificial intelligence system created by researchers at the University of California has solved the Rubik's Cube in just over a second. DeepCubeA, as the algorithm was called, completed the 3D logic puzzle which has been taxing humans since it was invented in 1974. "It learned on its own," said report author Prof Pierre Baldi. The researchers noted that its strategy was very different from the way humans tackle the puzzle. "My best guess is that the AI's form of reasoning is completely different from a human's," said Prof Baldi, who is professor of computer science at University of California, Irvine.

Analyzing reachability in large discrete transition systems is an important sub-problem in several areas of AI, and of CS in general. State space search is a basic method for conducting such an analysis. A wealth of techniques have been proposed to reduce the search space without affecting the existence of (optimal) solution paths. In particular, strong stubborn set (SSS) pruning is a prominent such method, analyzing action dependencies to prune commutative parts of the search space. We herein show how to apply this idea to star-topology decoupled state space search, a recent search reformulation method invented in the context of classical AI planning. Star-topology decoupled state space search, short decoupled search, addresses planning tasks where a single center component interacts with several leaf components. The search exploits a form of conditional independence arising in this setting: given a fixed path p of transitions by the center, the possible leaf moves compliant with p are independent across the leaves. Decoupled search thus searches over center paths only, maintaining the compliant paths for each leaf separately. This avoids the enumeration of combined states across leaves. Just like standard search, decoupled search is adversely affected by commutative parts of its search space. The adaptation of strong stubborn set pruning is challenging due to the more complex structure of the search space, and the resulting ways in which action dependencies may affect the search. We spell out how to address this challenge, designing optimality-preserving decoupled strong stubborn set (DSSS) pruning methods. We introduce a design for star topologies in full generality, as well as simpler design variants for the practically relevant fork and inverted fork special cases. We show that there are cases where DSSS pruning is exponentially more effective than both, decoupled search and SSS pruning, exhibiting true synergy where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Empirically, DSSS pruning reliably inherits the best of its components, and sometimes outperforms both.

A deep-learning algorithm has been developed which can solve the Rubik's cube faster than any human can. It never fails to complete the puzzle, with a 100 per cent success rate and managing it in around 20 moves. Humans can beat the AI's mark of 18 seconds, the world record is around four seconds, but it is far more inefficient and people often require around 50 moves. It was created by University of California Irvine and can be tried out here. Given an unsolved cube, the machine must decide whether a specific move is an improvement on the existing configuration.

"These characteristics are shared by many other problems in robotics and other domains that require some kind of planning," added Baldi. "Imagine a robot tasked with cleaning up your kitchen: there is an astronomical number of sequences of moves, but only very few lead to a clean kitchen. And randomly moving dirty dishes around is not going to do it." "More broadly, this work is part of a general effort to bridge machine learning AI and symbolic AI to address complex problems that humans solve through planning and reasoning," added Baldi. In the study, researchers wanted to understand how and why the AI made its moves and how long it took to perfect its method.

One of the main, long-term objectives of artificial intelligence is the creation of thinking machines. To that end, substantial effort has been placed into designing cognitive systems; i.e. systems that can manipulate semantic-level information. A substantial part of that effort is oriented towards designing the mathematical machinery underlying cognition in a way that is very efficiently implementable in hardware. In this work we propose a 'semi-holographic' representation system that can be implemented in hardware using only multiplexing and addition operations, thus avoiding the need for expensive multiplication. The resulting architecture can be readily constructed by recycling standard microprocessor elements and is capable of performing two key mathematical operations frequently used in cognition, superposition and binding, within a budget of below 6 pJ for 64- bit operands. Our proposed 'cognitive processing unit' (CoPU) is intended as just one (albeit crucial) part of much larger cognitive systems where artificial neural networks of all kinds and associative memories work in concord to give rise to intelligence.

We introduce the Neural State Machine, seeking to bridge the gap between the neural and symbolic views of AI and integrate their complementary strengths for the task of visual reasoning. Given an image, we first predict a probabilistic graph that represents its underlying semantics and serves as a structured world model. Then, we perform sequential reasoning over the graph, iteratively traversing its nodes to answer a given question or draw a new inference. In contrast to most neural architectures that are designed to closely interact with the raw sensory data, our model operates instead in an abstract latent space, by transforming both the visual and linguistic modalities into semantic concept-based representations, thereby achieving enhanced transparency and modularity. We evaluate our model on VQA-CP and GQA, two recent VQA datasets that involve compositionality, multi-step inference and diverse reasoning skills, achieving state-of-the-art results in both cases. We provide further experiments that illustrate the model's strong generalization capacity across multiple dimensions, including novel compositions of concepts, changes in the answer distribution, and unseen linguistic structures, demonstrating the qualities and efficacy of our approach.

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