"but only after being told how"

Or after the programmer has figured out how and programmed the phone to run the same logic.

Yes, it's a machine that simply does what it's told. Yes, it's not hard for a piece of software to solve a cube. Most innovations (e.g. auto-parking on BMW's) are the same sort of innovation. For goodness sake, see it for what it is... *lego* connected to a mobile *phone* to do something pointless *really* fast.

I want one!

Beer, because these guys deserve one. More than one. But they only have 5.3 seconds to drink them.

@Steve Knox

At that stage, it may be too late.

same as humans then.

Humans don't solve Rubic's cube puzzles without knowing the rules for getting colors from one spot to another spot, either. Credit goes to the robot builders twice - once for understanding the workings of the Rubic's cube to the degree that they could write a program that solves them, and then even more credit for building an awesome (if a bit pointless) robot that solves the physical puzzle! Bragging rights doesn't even begin to describe their amount of win.

But if we're going to talk philosophy, robotics and AI aren't about making robots "intelligent". Shooting something down for not trying to is like claiming a dish made with "vegetarian fish balls" can't be tasty because it's not real fish, even though tastiness is not related to being fish. Time to get the qualifiers right: robotics and AI are about automating things that humans need to be intelligent for, ideally to the point that it's become trivial. Like, say, solving Rubic's cube.

Lots of things that you need to be really smart for as a human turn out to be trivial when have even a modest bit of robot kit available. A good scientific conclusion is that apparently intelligence isn't worth achieving, because it's apparently not necessary for doing useful and even awesome things.

Never mind that on a technical note, intelligence is an a posteriori evaluation, not a guiding quality. The actually useful quality measure is success at a task. Someone or something that has the potential to fail a task but achieves success, is said to be "intelligent", whereas someone or something that fails the task is said to not be intelligent (and someone or something that lacks the ability to fail cannot be rated). So talking about intelligence for robots is nonsense in the first place.

And then of course on a scientific note: "Intelligence" doesn't mean anything. It's not measurable, which means that using it shows you don't actually know what you really want to measure, or implement for that matter. Useful word when talking about people's behaviour, utterly useless word when objectively talking about carrying out some task.