Self-Taught AI Masters Rubik's Cube in Just 44 Hours

Incredibly, the system learned to dominate the classic 3D puzzle in just 44 hours and without any human intervention. "A generally intelligent agent must be able to teach itself how to solve problems in complex domains with minimal human supervision," write the authors of the new paper, published online at the arXiv preprint server. Indeed, if we're ever going to achieve a general, human-like machine intelligence, we'll have to develop systems that can learn and then apply those learnings to real-world applications. Recent breakthroughs in machine learning have produced systems that, without any prior knowledge, have learned to master games like chess and Go. But these approaches haven't translated very well to the Rubik's Cube.