Caption from a photograph said to be from the Washington Post,
April 13, 1982:
University of Illinois engineering student Daniel Talken
adjusts the mechanical hands of a robot built by students
at the school in Urbana to solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle.
The robot's computer brain can work out the solution in
two-tenths of a second, but it takes the hands about 12
minutes to make average 110 moves to solve the puzzle.
The photo shows a guy diddling a complicated machine in which an
unsolved cube is visible. Eyes are painted on the front of the
machine's support above a bulge that may be functional as well as
vaguely resembling a nose. No camera equipment is apparent;
presumably they tell the machine how the cube is scrambled, or
cheat and have the machine itself scramble the cube.