In retrospect, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s homicidal cyborg from The Terminator would have been great at solving Rubik’s Cubes, which were cresting in popularity at the time of his first movie. Not that he would have wasted his time on it, the killing of “Sar-uh Conn-uh” being his top priority, but he could easily have made that famous puzzle game his bitch. He would have picked up the cube, studied it from all angles, analyzed it with that Terminator brain of his, and solved it in a matter of seconds. The results might have looked a lot like “Augmented Reality Rubik’s Cube Solving Assistant,” a strange video that recently surfaced on YouTube. In fact, the video is the work of one Martin Španěl, a Czech student who created a puzzle-solving program called Mistr Kostky as his bachelor thesis project at Prague’s Charles University.
Španěl describes Mistr Kostky as “a program that assists you with the solving of a Rubik’s Cube” and says that it “works in two phases.” First, the program determines “the permutation of the cube.” Once this matter is settled, Mistr Kostky moves on to its sinister second phase: “It computes how to solve it in 20 turns or less and shows the first turn directly on the cube.” So it’s official: Computers have already made humans look like total chumps at both chess and Jeopardy!, and now they’re moving on to Rubik’s Cubes. Well, that’s just great. Španěl describes Mistr Kostky as a “work in progress,” but it’s only a matter of time.