CG_Morton comments on Say Not "Complexity" - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 August 2007 04:22AM

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Comment author: CG_Morton 14 June 2011 04:47:48PM 0 points [-]

Exactly the difficulty of solving a Rubik's cube is that it doesn't respond to heuristics. A cube can be 5 moves from solved and yet look altogether a mess, whereas a cube with all but one corner correct is still some 20 moves away from complete (by the methods I looked up at least). In general, -humans- solve a Rubik's cube by memorizing sequences of moves with certain results, and then string these sub-solutions together. An AI, though, probably has the computational power to brute force a solution much faster than it could manipulate the cube.

The more interesting question (I think) is how it figures out a model for the cube in the first place. What makes the cube a good problem is that it's designed to match human pattern intuitions (in that we prefer the colors to match, and we quickly notice the seams that we can rotate through), but an AI has no such intuitions.

Comment author: DanielLC 15 June 2011 02:28:04AM 0 points [-]

Exactly the difficulty of solving a Rubik's cube is that it doesn't respond to heuristics. A cube can be 5 moves from solved and yet look altogether a mess, whereas a cube with all but one corner correct is still some 20 moves away from complete (by the methods I looked up at least).

I don't know the methods you used, but the only ones I know of have certain "steps" where you can easily tell what step it's on. For example, by one method, anything that's five moves away will have all but two sides complete.