The Use of Vision and Manipulation to Solve the "Instant Insanity" Puzzle

This paper describes a system which solves the puzzle "Instant Insanity". The puzzle consists of four multicolored cubes. The solution involves arranging the cubes in a tower so that no side of the tower reveals more than one face of a given color. Our system, which runs as eight (multitask) jobs under the PDP-10 time-sharing system, uses a TV camera to locate four objects and, having verified that they are cubes, to find the color of each face. A mechanical arm turns the cubes over to expose all faces to the TV. Having found the solution, the arm then stacks the cubes into a tower to demonstrate it.