Erwaman's Personal Journal - July 2014

Future Cubing Goals

Three weeks ago, I went to my first competition of 2014, Bay Area Speedcubin' (BASC) 3: Flagj Day 2014. I don't really cube much nowadays, but I decided to go to this competition because it was a 6-minute bike ride from my house and also because they were holding the Skewb event, a new event added this year.

One of my cubing goals is to get an official result in every event, both single and average (if tracked). At this last competition, I managed to get my first official Skewb single and average results. However, in addition to the new Skewb event they added this year, they also started tracking 3x3 blindfolded means and 3x3 fewest moves means.

In my 9 years of doing blindfolded, before this competition, I had only gotten one official blindfolded mean -- 3:32.69 from Cornell Spring 2007. I've gotten 2 out of 3 several other times and have only DNF'd all 3 attempts once -- at Connecticut Summer 2009. For the past 9 competitions I've competed in blindfolded at, I've always gotten at least one solve under 3 minutes. My official PR and the only time I've ever gotten under 2 minutes in competition was my 1:56.05 at Princeton Fall 2010. Sadly, I've been in the 2 to 3 minute range since 2007, and I'm still using the same method I that I started with -- 3OP (3-cycle orientation permutation), which I learned from Tyson Mao's blindfolded tutorial. Without any practice, I knew I had very little chance of breaking my 1:56.05 PR blindfolded single, but there was a chance I could beat my 3:32.69 blindfolded average. I thus took my time memorizing and ended up with three successful attempts and a new PR blindfolded average of 3:16.01.

Blindfolded cubing (BLD) has evolved a lot since when I started blindfolded cubing in 2005. Back then, almost everyone used 3OP, and the only differences were the order people did the four steps (my order: edge orientation, corner orientation, corner permutation, edge permutation) and memorization method: numbers, letters, or completely visual (which is what I do). Now, most people use M2 for solving edges. For corners, some people still use 3OP, since R2 (the complement to M2) tends to involve a lot of setup turns, though most of the elite solvers use freestyle commutators for both edges and corners. I understand how all of these methods work, but I haven't put in the time needed to make them faster than 3OP is for me. I do use freestyle commutators for 4x4 blindfolded, 5x5 blindfolded, and 3x3 multi-blind, because freestyle commutators requires less memorization, which is helpful when you're memorizing a lot of stuff. Also, cubers like Chris Hardwick have really pushed forward memorization techniques, borrowing tactics from the memory competition circuit. People now use letter pairs to refer to 2 pieces at a time and have a prepared image for every letter pair. For single blindfolded solves, some cubers just use an audio sound associated with each letter pair and just memorize a stream of gibberish using their auditory memory. This is faster to memorize and recall than associating an image to each letter pair. Finally, some people put three letter pairs together into a Person-Action-Object unit where the first letter pair represents a person, the next pair represents an Action, and the last pair represents an Object. This PAO unit becomes a single memorization block and can be placed at one location inside a memory palace. In the future, I'd like to get better at blindfolded cubing and practice freestyle commutators + letter pair memorization to the point where it's faster than 3OP + visual memorization. I'd also like to get consistently sub-2-minutes.

The fewest moves competition (FMC) has been around since the 2003 World Championships (the first world championship since 1982), but the World Cube Association did not start tracking mean of 3 attempts for FMC until this year. They then retroactively found all the competitions that held 3 FMC attempts and were able to reconstruct the mean of 3 world record progression, which starts in 2009 at the Clermont Open in France, the first time a competition hosted 3 FMC attempts. I have never been to a competition that had 3 FMC attempts, so I do not yet have a mean of 3 for FMC. However, at US Nationals this year, they will have 3 attempts, so I plan to get my first official mean of 3 then.

The only other category for which I do not have an official result is Square-1 average. I had practice Square-1 and got my average consistently below one minute, which was originally the cut-off for completing an average at last year's CCFC Fall 2013 competition. However, due to time constraints, they lowered the threshold to 45 minutes, and I was not able to meet it. I thus plan to improve my Square-1 times further to meet the 40-second cut-off for US Nationals 2014.

In additional to getting official results for Square-1 average and FMC mean, and improving my blindfolded times and techniques, I'd also like to improve my one-handed and 4x4 times.

In one-handed (OH), I've been around 30 seconds for about 5 years, even as the cube equipment has improved. I switched from using my ring finger to using my pinky (as most elites use) for R turns, but I still haven't been able to get the fluidity that is necessary to become a consistent 25-second or 20-second OH solver. OH is definitely highly technical, and cubers often use a whole different set of optimized OH algorithms. I've tried several times to improve my OH technique, but my times don't seem to budge much. I want to push past this plateau and get to a consistent 25 seconds and also get a sub-20 single in competition.

When I started cubing, for 4x4 there were the reduction method (centers first, pair up edges, then solve like a 3x3) and the cage method (centers last), which I think only Per Kristen Fredlund used ;-). Everyone used reduction (and that's what everyone uses for bigger cubes, too) until Robert Yau developed the Yau method. It's still a reduction method, but you mix the three parts -- solving centers, pairing edges, and solving like a 3x3. Now all the elite cubers use Yau. I know the steps of the Yau method, but I haven't practiced it enough for it to be faster than pure reduction. Mastering Yau and becoming a consistent sub-minute 4x4 solver is another one of my cubing goals.

That's about it for my cubing goals. I'm no longer very interested in 3x3 or 2x2 speedsolving, as the amount of effort and the amount of algorithms needed to improve those events is too high. It would just be a lot of rote memorization and drilling, which is boring. I would rather focus on OH and BLD because I feel that I have a lot of room to improve my technique in both of those events. I still feel clumsy, like a newbie, in both of those events.

Oh, and I guess I should still practice feet because I still have a slim chance in that event at Nationals.