Lego Rubik's Cube solving robots at London user group, Monday 16th July 2012

[ROUGOL]

Early notification about the slightly unusual but guaranteed to be
fascinating next meeting of the RISC OS User Group Of London:


Lego Rubik's Cube Solving Robots
Presented by David Gilday, ARM Ltd

Monday 16th July 2012, 7:45pm

The Blue-Eyed Maid (upstairs in the Spice Lounge restaurant)
173 Borough High Street
London
SE1 1HR


This month we are delighted to have David Gilday as our guest
speaker. David's day job is as principal engineer at ARM Ltd,
designing the chips that power the world's smart phones and of
course our favourite OS.

As if that wasn't exciting enough, in his spare time he creates
robots using Lego that can solve the Rubik's Cube! The robots are
built using standard Lego sets and Mindstorms motors, controlled by
an Android mobile phone (ARM powered obviously) running David's
software to analyse the cube and compute the most efficient moves
to solve it.

The most recent, the CubeStormerII built with Mike Dobson, holds
the world record for solving the standard cube in 5.2s, surpassing
even the fastest human. Other versions solve cubes from the usual
3x3x3 all the way upto 7x7x7, with varying degrees of speed and
complexity.

David will be bringing several of these robots along to ROUGOL to
show them in action, describing how they work and some of the
practical issues around manipulating the Rubik's cube, including
why the 7x7x7 cube isn't actually a cube at all.

Video of the Speedcuber in action:

High quality AVI -
http://legless.jellybaby.net/rougol/speedcuber/speedcuber.avi

RiscPC friendly MPEG -
http://legless.jellybaby.net/rougol/speedcuber/speedcuber.mpg


The usual arrangements
======================

Admittance is free and everyone is welcome. A range of hot and cold
food, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, will be on sale.

Anyone with wireless enabled handhelds or laptops can access the
internet during the meeting, or (if time allows) use ROUGOL's
RiscPC to do so after the main presentation has finished.

The venue is between London Bridge and Borough tube stations, so
readily accessible by public transport (both stations are a five
minute walk away, through well lit and CCTV'd main streets). It
also has ample cycle parking (covered by CCTV) very close by.

If you are arriving by car, the Congestion Charge ends at 6pm and
our meeting starts much later. However, please note that parking
on double red lines is restricted at all times. On single red or
yellow lines it is best to park after 7pm. If you are not familiar
with *central* London parking or driving, please allow extra time,
patience, and maps.

If you need any help reaching the venue, or any other information,
please contact us as below.

RISC OS User Group Of London in...@rougol.jellybaby.net
http://rougol.jellybaby.net/ 07970 211 629


_______________________________________________________________
a.m.c...@argonet.co.uk, Moderator of comp.sys.acorn.announce.
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