pll_trainer: helps you practice PLL's

badmephisto said:
ok how about this for OLL trainer

http://www.cdf.utoronto.ca/~g6karpat/pll_trainer/Oll_Trainer.zip

it works, but it looks bad :D
also, its hard to see yellow on white... someone could maybe do a yellow onb lack version or something?
Click to expand...

W/o a scroll bar, it's impossible to see all of the cases on screen. And I'll try to make decent-looking images for it later on today for the yellow. Everything

haha your welcome, and your sig is out of date.

EDIT: I'm putting a black rectangle around the yellow bars, and 2-Look algorithms have a light blue border around them. Some images are also being flipped around, because some of them don't match the ones on your site.

**Everyone Else: It still says PLL throughout the program, so recognize what you're using by the Title, or more obviously, the pictures. :P
 
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teller said:
Here, I have blackened in the background on all of them...it's a little better:

Download modified images here
Click to expand...

please tell me you did not do this manually?
I could probably make a python script to do this. in fact it seems like a good exercise.. i wonder how many lines of code it would need hmmm

actually now that i think of it even photoshop would be really easy to use for this, because you can make droplets that do batch work... the work being: select all white, fill black, save and replace. droplets are one of the most amazing features of photoshop that most of the people dont know about...
 
badmephisto said:
teller said:
Here, I have blackened in the background on all of them...it's a little better:

Download modified images here
Click to expand...

please tell me you did not do this manually?
I could probably make a python script to do this. in fact it seems like a good exercise.. i wonder how many lines of code it would need hmmm

actually now that i think of it even photoshop would be really easy to use for this, because you can make droplets that do batch work... the work being: select all white, fill black, save and replace. droplets are one of the most amazing features of photoshop that most of the people dont know about...
Click to expand...


boxed.gif


On the bright side, it only took a few minutes.
 
Please don't tell me I wasted my time doing them... :(
It was manually, and it did take some time... :(

I was waiting for a response before posting them; I checked for hours throughout the day, but not in the evening...

Then again, they're not so similar: There's still some tweaking that needs to be done, but it's optional. It's turning the 90 or 180 degress. The order doesn't matter though, since they'll be random.
 
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send it to my badmephisto at gmail.com

no i wouldn't mind sharing the source code, but really... who still owns VB6? The language is a dinosaur.
 
I'm already really glad that you've decided to make an OLL version out of it, since it's relatively easy to convert the PLL one. But I suppose people with lower resolutions can't properly use the program, mine is 1280 * 1024 and I can't see the ones all the way on the right. So I really need a scrollbar or else I won't be able to deselect the ones I haven't learned yet.
 
I got an auto-email back saying that my message failed to send...

And the file is too big to send here, meaning I would have to send them picture-by-picture if I wanted to post them.
 
If I may voice my opinion, I don't think we should recommend this program to beginners (not that anyone already has, I hope). I've scanned through every page of the thread and I've seen quite a few "Thanks badmephisto, this really helps me in learning my PLLs!" I think this is an absolutely wrong approach to learning PLLs. You shouldn't even be touching this program when you're still learning PLLs.

Badmephisto made it very clear, many times, that this is just an execution calculator, nothing more. If you're still at the learning stage, execution should be the least of your worries.

People who are not even sub-18 have gotten sub-40 PLL time attacks (so I've heard, not too sure about this), thereby showing that fast PLL execution times does not necessarily mean fast cubing times, if you don't already know this obvious fact. If you're too used to moving your fingers too quickly, you're gonna be moving fast during F2L too (even when you feel like you're going slow), and it's gonna be very hard for your eyes to adapt to looking ahead at that kind of speed, unless you're Yu Nakajima, but he's just one of a kind.

And I found even more ridiculous posts about OLL trainers: Since when was OLL ever about execution speed?! Again, other than Yu Nakajima (and some other Japanese cubers), I believe most of the top cubers slow down at the end of OLL to recognize PLL and minimize the pause between OLL and PLL.

Imo, LLtrainer is not a bad program at all, in fact, it's imo the best program that can help you improve your LL. I hope most of the top cubers would agree with me that LL (for the average cuber) is more about recognition time than about execution speed. By "improving your LL" I mean improving it as a whole - the sum of recognition and execution times, and imho recognition plays a larger role than execution, however slightly. Because the former is the brainy part and the latter is the braindead part.

LLtrainer helps you practice the entire "slow down at the end of OLL to recognize PLL, then spam PLL" process.

Badmephisto's PLL trainer should only be used when you're intermediate/advanced, and you feel/know that your times are plateauing because of the physical aspect of cubing: fingerspeed, NOT because of recognition/lookahead/other mental aspects of cubing.
 
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Responding to blah, I'd like to say that I used the PLL trainer simply to help memorize the algorithms, in the beginning I don't care about the speed, I just want something where I can turn on and off the ones I know and that generates a case randomly. This random way of trying to memorize is much better than trying to do them always in the same order. The times are for me still secondary, first I just want to learn a PLL or OLL and then I just use the timer to get an acceptable time, maybe about 3-5 seconds each. Afterwards, when I know ALL OLL's (I already know all the PLL's partially thanks to the PLL trainer), I may try to get faster by training my execution and especially my F2L recognition and cross pre-planning (I'm already working on both). I don't worry too much about getting a harder look-ahead because of a quick execution, since this is all about practising a lot.

For completeness, I'm averaging around 38 seconds, single best unlucky is 28.68.
 
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Well I guess that's what I like to call healthy cubing then :) I wasn't targeting anyone with that post, I just wanted to reiterate the overused cubing mantra: "go slow, look ahead." I guess there's no harm done in wanting to learn all the PLLs asap, one gets a certain amount of satisfaction from that, no doubt, but I don't think there's a problem with taking one's time to learn each PLL till one is comfortable with it either.
 
@Blah: I totally understand what you are saying. It's actually the reason that I wrote my own PLL trainer: So I could train on recognition rather than on execution speed. I still try to execute fast, but the recognition of a random PLL is the difficult part IMHO. My program gives you scrambles that result in a random PLL being presented to you. I do the scrambles without looking, then look down and try to recognize and execute as fast as possible. Here are a few examples of what my program generates:

z R2 B' D B' U2 B D' B' U2 B2 z'

U R2 D R D' R F2 L' U L F2

x2 D B R' B' R D R D' R' B R D' R' D R D R' B' x2

x' F' D R F' R' F R F R2 D' R F R F' R' x

The cube turns are calculated and put into the scrambles in order to obfuscate the PLL setup, as if you do these dozens of times, you'll start recognizing the setups. The cube turns help keep you from figuring it out. I also embed a random U face turn and a random cube rotate around y, simulating what you'd get from a real PLL in a solve. Anyway, I don't mean to hijack the thread; just sharing my thoughts and experience on PLL training.

Brian.
 
Certainly you bring up good points, but i think you are a little too critical.
Improving speed on both PLL and OLL is important, and I don't see there being a strong connection to F2L. You can go different speed at different stages, I don't see why you would slip into a "quick mode" and only be able to cube at that speed. You may be tempted to, but you can always override that consciously. I dont think its a problem.

And yes, I do slightly slow down last moves of OLL to recognize the PLL, but of course, this whole thing is an approximation, and facts remain: you get faster speed by more practice. This program forces you to really practice these things over and over, and it will speed you up without a doubt. Not because it times you per se, but because it makes you do these PLL's over..and over...and over again, in random order.

Also one more big advantage i think this program has is that it lets you see which PLLs or OLLs you need to improve on, quantitatively supported by evidence :) It inspired me to seek better algorithms, and again, get better overall.

I also approve of blgentry's approach, and its certainly a good idea. The only problem with it is that it combines a lot of stages into that one single time, so the resulting time doesnt give you useful information about why you are fast or slow, it just ranks you. But of course, you can empirically figure that out yourself perhaps and then act on it. Its all good.

ANYWAY
I dont see why you cant send a zipfile of 60pictures. it should be no more than a mb or something.

I'll send you the source code virkill
 
badmephisto said:
I also approve of blgentry's approach, and its certainly a good idea. The only problem with it is that it combines a lot of stages into that one single time, so the resulting time doesnt give you useful information about why you are fast or slow, it just ranks you. But of course, you can empirically figure that out yourself perhaps and then act on it. Its all good.
Click to expand...

My trainer doesn't do timings. It only gives you scrambles. I think it's easy for me to see which PLLs I'm having trouble recognizing after doing a session with the program. Of course I have no idea of my exact speed, but I get a general idea of which PLLs I need to work on. Plus I have a feature to include only the PLLs you want (optionally) so you can work on those problem PLLs, but still have them shoot out at you randomly.

My program is very much like Brunson's Drill Sergeant. Funny how that works, since I came up with the idea, discussed it with him, and we both wrote our own versions. :) I have written drill sergeant command line and GUI, while he has his own command line and web versions.

Brian.
 
Sorry for the kick, but a scroll bar would be nice so that I can finally use the OLL trainer. Screen resolution is 1024 * 1280 and the trainer's resolution is too high to be entirely visible on my pc. Much appreciated. By the way, thanks for the PLL recognition tutorial on youtube, will definitely bring more structure to my recognition and should help me get that extra time off.
 
:)

Thank you I think it is useful and good that you can enable and disable them so you don't need to do ones you haven't learnt :0

THANKS xD
 
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