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We like solving
puzzles

Frank Agency

Project

An Interactive
Experiential Installation

The brief

With 43 quintillion
combinations... could it be
solved using AI?

The Rubik’s Cube has kept 350 million people entertained, perplexed, and thoroughly frustrated for nearly 40 years. There were a few wonder kids who managed to master the art of the puzzle, but could we use AI to outsmart those annoying geeks?

One other thing...

Can we use Huawei’s AI processing power to do the work?!

To celebrate the launch of Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro, Frank PR wanted to put its AI processing capabilities to the test. We also needed to put the new phone into people’s hands and give them a great experience. The plan? Create a giant version of the iconic puzzle, and help people solve it using the phone. A great idea, with two big challenges: creating a learning model capable of solving the innumerable possible combinations, and building a giant, digital version of the cube.

Our solution

We built a 6m high
interactive cube at London’s
Southbank!

All controlled by a very
clever handset!

One of our developers has a degree in architecture. It’s not that useful for machine learning algorithms, but very handy for design structures like this. All six sides of our Rubik's Cube needed to be visible at all times, and all six needed to be faced with LED panels. This meant that we had to balance our cube on a single corner, and with the help of ITR Events we managed to build a carefully weighed structure from scaffolding poles raised above a load bearing stage.

While they wrestled with big lumps of metal, we got on with the code. First up, we trained a TensorFlow model to recognise the current position of the puzzle and identify the moves needed to complete it. Then we built an app version of the puzzle, which relayed the display of each face of the cube to the corresponding LED panel on our scaffolding structure in real time. Finally, we packaged the TensorFlow model specifically for the Mate 20 Pro’s Dual NPU and added it to the app.

The result

We lit up
Southbank

Hundreds of people came down to London’s Southbank to pit themselves against our 4m high, AI-enhanced version of the Rubik's Cube, with Georgia Toffolo, from Made in Chelsea, the first to play.

When she shuffled rows and columns on the app, the LED displays on the cube responded to show everybody else her current position in the puzzle. And when, along with almost everyone else, she got stuck, Georgia could request a tip from the app, and our AI model responded by nudging her along the next few moves.