I think Many of the commanders have misread her question; it's not, how would you make a program to solve a rubiks cube (which is brute forceable as there are a finite number of states for a rubiks cube), but how do you program an ai so it can work out how to do so. The ai has to study the cube and determine the possible states of the cube (and how to write them down mathematically) and the operators available to change the state of the cube. This means it has to know what a state and an operator are (if not by name). It then has to work out how to combine the operators to change the state to a predetermined state, which we happen to call a solved cube. The ai has to be able to do this with you never having coded into the ai anything specific to do with a rubiks cube, or any methods to solve the rubiks cube. The next step would be to code an ai where it ha to work out for itself that it must combine operators to change the state of the cube. I don't think I could manage to code the simpler version; for it to have been coded well, it must be able to solve any problem, not just the rubiks cube.