• Welcome to the Speedsolving.com, home of the web's largest puzzle community!
    You are currently viewing our forum as a guest which gives you limited access to join discussions and access our other features.

    Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community of 40,000+ people from around the world today!

    If you are already a member, simply login to hide this message and begin participating in the community!

At one point can someone say they are sub-X?

Pickleninjas

Member
Joined
Nov 19, 2018
Messages
3
I just finished an average of 150 spread over a week and got a mean of 19.15. At this point could I say I'm sub 20?
In the average the worst solve was a 25.72 and the best was 12.75
 

DGCubes

Member
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
1,823
Location
Over there
WCA
2013GOOD01
YouTube
Visit Channel
I generally say that it depends more on how you feel about your results than the results themselves. I have a 9.79 average of 100 on 3x3, but I still hesitate to say I'm sub-10 because I was having a really good day solving-wise when I got that average. If that 19.15 mean felt relatively normal to you and it didn't feel like a fluke, I'd say you're definitely sub-20.
 

xyzzy

Member
Joined
Dec 24, 2015
Messages
2,877
"Sub-x" doesn't really have a consistent definition that people use. This is really a question about drawing boundaries.

Literally taken, it just means that a value is below x. But what value are you comparing to x? How do you deal with occasional outliers?

Pretty much all of my times are below 35 seconds. So it would be pretty indisputable that I'm "sub-35". We can shift that down to 25 seconds, and like 99.5% of my times are below 25 seconds, so there wouldn't be too much of an objection to saying that I'm "sub-25" either. At the other extreme, while I get sub-10 singles every so often, they're so rare (~1%) that it wouldn't make sense to consider me "sub-10". If I had to call myself sub-x, then this narrows the range of x down to (10, 25), but where exactly should x be?

You could take the median of your solve times and make an objective statement like "half of my solves are below xx:yy". You can phrase that in terms of sub-x as "I'm sub-xx:yy half of the time", or simplify that to just "I'm sub-xx:yy".

Or you could take the "average", which, in cubing, refers to a 5% trimmed mean. (So that's one bit of terminology we actually managed to standardise! There are some timer apps that just drop only the best and worst singles though, so watch out for that.) You could say "my PB ao100 is sub-xx:yy", or just "I'm sub-xx:yy". If you feel like being stricter, maybe you could replace ao100 with ao1000 or something.

But what if you had a really good ao100 once, but it was a really long time ago and you never managed to get an ao100 as good again? If your PB ao100 is 19.99, while your usual ao100s are in the 20.5-21.0 range, should you consider yourself "sub-20"? Some people don't care and would just say they're sub-20. Some people care a bit more and say "eh, maybe not yet". So their criterion for being sub-x would be "PB ao100 below x, except sometimes I don't feel like it so maybe below x−0.5 or something like that"; or perhaps "ao100 below x often enough", where "often enough" is conveniently left unspecified. These obviously don't work as objective definitions due to their vagueness. (I'm not attacking strawmen here; these are very real opinions that real people hold.)

Yes, these are edge cases. But looking at edge cases is exactly how you start to draw boundaries. The obvious cases are obvious and not worth mentioning; the non-obvious ones are the ones we need to talk about.

I actually have no idea where I'm going with this, but tl;dr just say what your current running ao100/ao1000 is and stop caring about "sub-x" because it doesn't have a universally understood interpretation.
 

Pickleninjas

Member
Joined
Nov 19, 2018
Messages
3
I generally say that it depends more on how you feel about your results than the results themselves. I have a 9.79 average of 100 on 3x3, but I still hesitate to say I'm sub-10 because I was having a really good day solving-wise when I got that average. If that 19.15 mean felt relatively normal to you and it didn't feel like a fluke, I'd say you're definitely sub-20.
wow...didn't expect to see you here! anyway after that I did another ao100 and got a 18.99 avg. After that I did another ao5 and got a 15.18 avg.
(video here :
:p) But the next morning I kept getting 21's so I guess I'm not 100% sub 20 yet... :(
 
Top