---
title: "Watch a Robot Hand Solve a Rubik’s Cube"
description: "OpenAI build an AI-powered robot hand that can solve a Rubik's cube more often than not, even when they started messing around with it."
date: "2019-10-16"
modified: "2019-10-21"
authors:
  - name: "Dan Robitzski"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/danrobitzski"
url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/watch-robot-hand-solve-rubiks-cube"
categories:
  - "Robotics"
  - "Robots and Machines"
tags:
  - "ai"
  - "OpenAI"
  - "robot"
  - "the digest"
---

# Watch a Robot Hand Solve a Rubik’s Cube

![OpenAI build an AI-powered robot hand that can solve a Rubik's cube more often than not, even when they started messing around with it.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/rubik.png>)
*\<em\>Image: Francis Ray via Pixabay/Tag Hartman-Simkins\</em\>*

## Helping Hand

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence development company [co-founded by Elon Musk](<https://futurism.com/ai-elon-musk-openai-profit>), just released software that lets an AI-powered robot hand that solve a Rubik's cube by itself.

After years of practicing in simulations, the robot hand is [finally nimble enough](<https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/>) to solve the puzzle about 60 percent of the time, though that number drops to 20 percent when faced with what OpenAI calls a "maximally difficult scramble." All told, [video footage](<https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=74&v=kVmp0uGtShk>) of the hand and its puzzle-solving AI at work is an impressive demo of the rapid progress engineers are making in the nascent field of dexterous, humanoid robotics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=74&v=kVmp0uGtShk

## Real-World Experience

OpenAI first programmed algorithms capable of solving a simulated Rubik's cube in 2017, but bringing that capability to the messy real world took years longer.

Armed with a deft reinforcement learning algorithm, the company says it was able to get a robot hand based on 15-year-old hardware built by the Shadow Robot Company to manipulate and solve the cube even when researchers bothered it, [according to OpenAI's research paper](<https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/papers/solving-rubiks-cube.pdf>).

## Jostling

In bonus footage included in [the company's blog post](<https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/>), the robot continues to work a Rubik's cube while ignoring a stuffed giraffe prodding it and other annoyances like tying its fingers together or briefly covering up the cube with a blanket. Now that it's able to overcome those surprise challenges, OpenAI hopes it's on the path toward more general-use AI.

"We set this goal because we believe that successfully training such a robotic hand to do complex manipulation tasks lays the foundation for general-purpose robots," reads the blog post.

*Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that OpenAI built the software, not the physical robot arm.*

**READ MORE:** [Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand](<https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/>) \[OpenAI\]

**More on OpenAI:** *[OpenAI Just Released a New Version of Its Fake News-Writing AI](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-new-version-writing-ai>)*

## Author
Dan Robitzki is a senior reporter for Futurism, where he likes to cover AI, tech ethics, and medicine. He spends his extra time fencing and streaming games from Los Angeles, California.

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://x.com/danrobitzski>)