An AI System Taught Itself How to Solve the Rubik's Cube in Just 44 Hours

A self-taught artificial intelligence (AI) system called DeepCube has mastered solving the Rubik's Cube puzzle in just 44 hours without human intervention. The system's inventors have detailed their design in a paper titled'Solving the Rubik's Cube Without Human Knowledge'. "A generally intelligent agent must be able to teach itself how to solve problems in complex domains with minimal human supervision," write the paper's authors. "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." While many AI systems have been taught to play games, mastering the complexity of a Rubik's Cube posed a unique set of challenges.