A robotic hand that OpenAI claimed could solve a Rubik's Cube by itself was heavily criticised by researchers who said the characterisation was highly misleading.

Trained using reinforcement learning in simulation, OpenAI's robot hand had a 60 percent success rate for average scrambles and 20 percent for the most difficult scrambles, according to a research paper published by the company.

Training the robot hand was done entirely in simulation, with the simulation parameters altered in each training round to make the algorithm more adaptable to different conditions.

While considered impressive, the achievement sparked controversy, as OpenAI had used Kociemba's algorithm, a 10+ year old non-learning algorithm to determine the sequence of moves to solve the cube, and yet its video implied the robot learned to solve the cube entirely by itself.

Critics compalined that OpenAI had overstated the accomplishment, thereby causing confusion about the system's true capabilities.

News, commentary, analysis 🗞️

• https://thenextweb.com/news/why-a-robot-that-can-solve-rubiks-cube-one-handed-has-the-ai-community-at-war

• https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/15/75292/a-robot-hand-taught-itself-to-solve-a-rubiks-cube-after-creating-its-own-training-regime/

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50064225

• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/10/26/overblown-claims-pr-stunts-dumb-ai-going-wrong-musks-research/

• https://blog.deeplearning.ai/blog/the-batch-robot-hand-works-rubiks-cube-self-driving-tanks-roll-toward-battle-face-rec-dataset-sparks-lawsuit-bayes-finds-wonder-material

• https://www.wired.com/story/why-solving-rubiks-cube-not-signal-robot-supremacy/

• https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/15/20914575/openai-dactyl-robotic-hand-rubiks-cube-one-handed-solve-dexterity-ai

• https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/21/ai_roundup_181019/

• https://venturebeat.com/2021/07/16/openai-disbands-its-robotics-research-team/

• https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/10/22/why-a-robot-that-can-solve-rubiks-cube-one-handed-has-the-ai-community-at-war/