New 2-Sided PLL Recognition Guide

Hello everyone,

I've just posted my new guide to 2-sided PLL recognition on my blog. Here's a direct link to the Dropbox file though, as it's my first blog post, so the site isn't exactly worth visiting yet:
http://tinyurl.com/lbssdpk
=Version 2.0 [updated May 29, 2014]

The guide deals only with Permuting the Last Layer (PLL) of a 3×3 Rubik’s-style cube. The aim is to make it easier to distinguish each of the 21 PLLs by looking at only two sides (i.e., just one of the four possible angles). This can reduce your time when speed-solving as you will not have to turn the cube to look at the hidden sides.

The guide requires that you can solve the first two layers of a 3×3 cube, can Orient the Last Layer (OLL) to make the top of your cube a solid color, and have PLL algorithms. There are excellent guides to doing all of these things on the web and on YouTube, and I have provided some resources at the back. In addition, I will soon be uploading a guide to doing PLLs from all (or most) angles of each PLL. I have found that learning multiple algs is helping me drill the recognition. Also in progress is an F2L guide and a multi-angle OLL guide.

Other cube aficionados have created very helpful guides to recognizing PLLs from just two sides. I put this guide together: to help me learn; to approach and present the material in a way that suits my learning style; and to contribute something to the cubing community. You may have a different learning style and find the other guides easier to use, or may simply find seeing how others conceptualize the same problem useful for improving your recognition. You can’t have too much good information. The “Credits and Resources” section will help you find those guides.

Please let me know of any errors you may find, so I can provide everyone with a better resource. I will update this thread and post here if I produce any updated versions.

My blog (for future reference) is at:
https://paritycasecubing.wordpress.com

Cheers!

Parity Case

PS. I also just read in interesting thread on a completely different recognition system by Lucas Garron that looks promising:
http://www.speedsolving.com/forum/showthread.php?47641-Improved-2-Sided-PLL-Recognition-System

Ooh! I'm glad someone else is working on this problem.

Parity Case said:

You may have a different learning style and find the other guides easier to use, or may simply find seeing how others conceptualize the same problem useful for improving your recognition. You can’t have too much good information.

Click to expand...

I agree that more insights are good, but when you sit down to learn something, there is such a thing as "too much information". That's why ZBLS + ZBLL never actually worked.

When I originally wanted to learn 2-sided recognition, I was able to come up with a lot of rules, but each case was so different. I gave up on it until I fond Andy's method, which treated most cases the same. But he had quite a few exceptions, and it was still some work to make the exceptions similar. That took a few more ideas.
I'm going to make sure to read through your full PDF to see if there are a few other ideas I haven't thought of.

Certainly. Too much can lead to overload, or confusion between systems. I intended it to mean something more like, "You can't have too much good information to choose from."

Determining the useful/relevant rules for 2-sided recognition was complicated at times. I ended up drawing my PLLs (in MS Paint...never again!), and then sat down with a bunch of cubes and did a a ton of other PLLs, cross referencing each angle of each case. For example, "This case X has feature Y... what other PLLs have that too, and of those, what are the differences?". I could have done the comparisons just by looking at my other last layer images, but I wanted the applied practice of working it all out on the cube, so that it might stick in my memory more easily. Part of the difficulty was trying to determine what set of rules to use - for example, I didn't use the headlights-with-opposite-colors (that you observe and use in your video) as a feature, though it's a perfectly sound approach too, and could perhaps have simplified a few of my descriptions. I was aiming for as few rules as possible, and ones that do not permit exceptions.

The aspect of my guide I'm finding most helpful in my practice is the comparisons I did with other PLLs that share similar features with the PLL case under examination. Working on this is helping me eliminate non-relevant cases when I hit the PLL stage in a solve. So I am applying positive and negative knowledge to speed recognition.

I'm also working on making flashcards with all of the info on them (for the Flashcards Deluxe app - I wish I knew how to write apps...). Hopefully done soon.

V2.0 released
http://tinyurl.com/lbssdpk

Key changes in V2.0

• Improved aesthetics (logo, cover, color, etc.)
• Simplified some descriptions
• Changed title slightly
• Minor typos and image problems fixed
• Added in-document hyperlinks (Click logos to return to Contents page; Contents page links to each section, and to each PLL)
• Added external hyperlinks in Credits and Resources page
• Updated Parity Case Cubing website and contact info

Cool. I am trying to improve PLL recognition as we speak. I look it over and give you my feedback.

Lazy Einstein said:

Cool. I am trying to improve PLL recognition as we speak. I look it over and give you my feedback.

Click to expand...

Super - I'd be grateful for that. I hope it helps!

As I'm working on a few other guides (less complex, thank goodness!), I'd be interested to know whether the internal hyperlinks (e.g. logos that link to contents page; PLL links on Contents page) throughout are beneficial. That took a fair bit of work, but if they improve accessibility, I'll use a similar technique in the other guides where relevant. Making guides is improving my PowerPoint skills, that's for sure...