An iconic puzzle from the 1980s — the Rubik’s Cube — is being used to bridge a very contemporary gap between deep learning and advanced mathematics. Pierre Baldi, the computer science professor overseeing the effort by a team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, described this gap as the greatest conundrum facing AI today.
“People complain that deep learning is a black box, and that they don’t know what the network is doing,” Baldi said. “We could see that the network was learning mathematics.” The Rubik’s Cube with multicolored faces has, of course, compelled and confounded people since its invention in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and architecture professor Ernő Rubik.
