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Does anyone else just memorize the whole cube+colors for 3BLD? I do!

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Ollie

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The only person I've seen launch anything close to legitimate hate was adimare, but that's just sort of how he rolls, so I wouldn't take it personally. Ollie might've used a 4-to-8-letter word at the outset, but that was also just an expression of skepticism. Kit, Mike, myself, and others just want to be convinced... like the saying goes: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You have made an extraordinary claim which, if true, is amazing. But so far, nothing you've shown and none of your explanations have satisfied the perfectly reasonable doubts we have. For instance, my question above hasn't been answered, because your explanation still lacks sense in the context of your method. I'm sorry if that's hurting your feelings. I know what it's like to be really proud of something only to have others shrug it off as nothing. But like Ollie said, we are an extremely skeptical community. If you had been around these forums a while longer, none of this would've been a surprise to you. This sort of thing happens at least once a year. You're just the lucky winner, is all.

While using a naughty word, I continued with the best intentions. But this post below just stood out for me and I'm done being courteous, as this reeks of /r/iamverysmart:

Look: I find your feats of BLD to be incredible, take lots and lots of work, and I admire you greatly for them, but they are not impossible. In the 80s, do you think people thought that 7BLD was possible? No! A 7x7x7 cube couldn't even exist back then! You are completely basing your arguments off of sheer doubt. I will tell you I am in MENSA if that helps legitimize my potential "amazingness," whatever that means. The human mind is capable of incredible things. Bad attention is not fame, I would rather be an outlier in the community than a hated one, which is what I have become. To be honest, I didn't think anyone would really care or take notice, certainly not to the level it has happened. I can play chess/go blindfolded and so I wanted to apply that to cubing.

Even playing chess and go blindfolded isn't comparable here. You've likely played thousands of games of each, and you will have better than average pattern recognition, planning ability and ability to think strategically.

You'll be able to play blindfolded because the starts of games are fairly standard at higher levels, with common defences and amounts of variance that allow you play blindfolded. I know first hand from losing to my old boss, a South African champion and is a beast at blitz chess. He thrashed me while he was blindfolded and proceeded to tell me virtually every move I made, but still not perfectly. Here's where I stick my neck out again.

I think that you think that you can apply that same logic to cubing and pass off being able to solve a cube blindfolded. Doing thousands of layer-by-layer solves doesn't qualify you to be able to do it blindfolded in such a way that you can simply remember the colours and have a perfect mental representation when you proceed to solve. As Mike said, this is beyond the realms of normal people, and unless you are an actual savant, which would be a huge claim, then I don't believe you.

I don't want to re-hash the criticisms we have laid out here around the strange solutions and convenient camera issues because I feel like you haven't addressed any of them. But I think you practiced the solution beforehand, and the unnecessary moves and rotations in your solution are a mask.

Edit: Made response slightly less rude.
 
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U

Underwatercuber

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I've been working on it for a YEAR. I did my research, I used all sorts of different memorization techniques that work for more advanced memo and to shoot down something you haven't looked into without giving it a proper chance is wrong.
Might want to check out some real bld memo and execution methods before calling this advanced lol
 
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So what exactly is going on in your head during inspection? Are you creating a blank cube and slowly filling in the colored stickers to eventually create the scrambled cube in your head? Then from there you don't need to look at it anymore cause its just in your head?
 
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Underwatercuber

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Again, I used a technique that allows the user to memorize a 52 card deck in thirty eight seconds (current world record) and multiple universities have been investigating. BLD single, double or triple piece swaps (commutators) on a Rubik's cube can't compete.
45 minute memo with 1 year of practice for 1:30 execution vs 8 second memo and 14 second execution. I was wrong your method wins :p
 
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Speed doesn't inherently connote complexity. My method has barely been explored. I'm sure Roux was inefficient when it was first conceptualized, but again I told you that I'm not good at speedsolving or BLD memo! I was hoping people with better cubing skills would be interested and try it out!
I personally won't try it, because I don't want to put a year worth of practice into a very difficult memo method when there is one that I can already do a lot faster with a lot less practice. But I do think that this is interesting, but it's not a method for me.
 

Kit Clement

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If that was "slightly less rude" than I don't know what to say. I've made an effort to calmly respond to every criticism I have received. I took an hour out of my valuable time (I run a company) to film a video. I have coherently explained my method, explained that I'm not good at any of the speed and BLD stuff (and admire people who are) and I was just proposing a new idea for the community. First of all, @Ollie, you don't know me, you don't know anything about what I have done or my experiences, so why are you judging my legitimacy off of a personal experience that you had with a completely different person? I just wanted to contribute to the community. There will be a full uncut video soon, but your mere "It can't be done" philosophy is quite exactly the philosophy that deters and prevents innovation. This methodology is new, I get that. I acknowledge that my first video was not convincing. I acknowledge that I made mistakes in the second, but to make that an excuse and justification to attack my dignity and me as a person is just illogical and kind of a mean thing to do. You haven't even given this method ten minutes of your attention. It was hard for me to visualize the cube at first, but I've been working on it for a YEAR. I did my research, I used all sorts of different memorization techniques that work for more advanced memo and you just walk up and shoot down something you haven't looked into without giving it a proper chance is wrong, just because you've been active on the forums longer.

People say things are impossible all of the time. Verdes made the "impossible" V Cubes, Pasteur proved that spontaneous generation didn't make sense, there are countless instances where the impossible became possible, and that innovation is what drives human society.

I'm not trying to equate my method for solving a Rubik's cube blindfolded with Plato's Republic, but the same logic applies, just at a much more trivial level.

Sorry, it's not in my nature to be rude or contradictory. I'm only responding to attacks that you made to me personally out of the blue.

It has become evident that there are people here who don't care about my method or my research, and instead attack my dignity. I am seriously contemplating ceasing my contributions to cubing in general. I would however like to thank those that have taken the time to explain the general skeptical mood of this community, but I do think that isn't the right kind of setting for my ideas or work.

Thanks again everyone

Research communities are not echo chambers where people support every single thought regardless of whether it is well thought out or valid. You need to be able to take criticism and respond to it in a calm manner if you want to be taken seriously. I would not have called Ollie's post offensive at all, but it seems like you are taking offense for people criticizing your ideas rather than you. Yes, people have criticized you for being a "fake," and I'm definitely skeptical of these videos, but I have not and won't outwardly accuse you of faking, and many people that you claim are attacking you or giving you a "bad reputation" are simply skeptics. You are making very exceptional claims with very little evidence. There are many arguments that people have presented that you have really only brushed off on the basis that new ideas are always good for innovation. With the exception of analogies to other memory sports (that don't necessarily apply to cubing anyway), I haven't really been convinced that your specific new method is a good idea.

Sure, we can't remain stale in old ways of thinking forever -- innovation is a good thing and should be welcomed. But not every new idea is gold, and even good ideas are met with healthy skepticism. The Yau method on 4x4 wasn't taken seriously until Dan Cohen tried it seriously and pushed others to try it once he got good results. But when people are doing 3-style 3x3 solves as quickly as 10-12 seconds, that leaves little room for the possible gains in execution to outweigh issues with this memo technique AND the tracing/visualizing that needs to be done mid-solve. I'm extremely skeptical that any method of this variety could outperform what current world class BLD solvers are doing.

I'm personally more interested in how you can visualize a mental model of the cube as you do turns rather than seeing you personally perform a BLD solve. Specifically, why would you need to rotate and do U turns to be able to see new parts of the cube? If you are visualizing the cube, why couldn't you see those colors/pieces before rotating/doing U moves? These are the lingering questions I have about the solves and visualizing you are doing, and I'm curious how your memory method makes it necessary/easier for you to solve in this manner.
 
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We have different definitions of "track." I memorize the cube and know where each piece is. You could call this tracking but it's different for the tracking in SpeedBLD. I clarify this difference and acknowledge my error later on in the thread.
I wasn't referring to anything about speedbld, I was just merely showing something that I saw was false.
 

Chree

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If that was "slightly less rude" than I don't know what to say. I've made an effort to calmly respond to every criticism I have received. I took an hour out of my valuable time (I run a company) to film a video. I have coherently explained my method, explained that I'm not good at any of the speed and BLD stuff (and admire people who are) and I was just proposing a new idea for the community. First of all, @Ollie, you don't know me, you don't know anything about what I have done or my experiences, so why are you judging my legitimacy off of a personal experience that you had with a completely different person? I just wanted to contribute to the community. There will be a full uncut video soon, but your mere "It can't be done" philosophy is quite exactly the philosophy that deters and prevents innovation. This methodology is new, I get that. I acknowledge that my first video was not convincing. I acknowledge that I made mistakes in the second, but to make that an excuse and justification to attack my dignity and me as a person is just illogical and kind of a mean thing to do. You haven't even given this method ten minutes of your attention. It was hard for me to visualize the cube at first, but I've been working on it for a YEAR. I did my research, I used all sorts of different memorization techniques that work for more advanced memo and you just walk up and shoot down something you haven't looked into without giving it a proper chance is wrong, just because you've been active on the forums longer.

People say things are impossible all of the time. Verdes made the "impossible" V Cubes, Pasteur proved that spontaneous generation didn't make sense, there are countless instances where the impossible became possible, and that innovation is what drives human society.

I'm not trying to equate my method for solving a Rubik's cube blindfolded with Plato's Republic, but the same logic applies, just at a much more trivial level.

Sorry, it's not in my nature to be rude or contradictory. I'm only responding to attacks that you made to me personally out of the blue.

It has become evident that there are people here who don't care about my method or my research, and instead attack my dignity. I am seriously contemplating ceasing my contributions to cubing in general. I would however like to thank those that have taken the time to explain the general skeptical mood of this community, but I do think that isn't the right kind of setting for my ideas or work.

Thanks again everyone

Or you could just prove him wrong. But whatevs.

Edit (to avoid double posting) - Another thing you might've known if you'd been around longer... New methods get posted here all the time. Some worth it, some not. But all of them generally begin with a clear explanation of the method, how it works, and how someone can learn to do it. Not solicitation for requests from your audience for any of the above. That was a bit of a red flag for me, honestly. "Hey, do you want me to post a tutorial?" Yes. If you can, obviously: Yes. Pretty easy question, man. Maybe I should be in MENSA.
 
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adimare

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There's a number of ways you could prove you're really capable of tracing all 20 pieces in your "mental cube" that don't involve having to memorize an initial state. As I recommended earlier, you could just apply the scramble to your mental cube and start solving it immediately; or as someone else suggested, you could just generate a random scramble, and without using a physical cube tell us how the scrambled cube would look like.

If you just upload a video of you staring at a cube for 45 min then solving it using a speedsolving method with a blindfold on, that won't really prove that you're solving it using a mental cube, because most of us here could replicate that (in way less time) by devising a solution while only tracking a few pieces at a time during memo.
 

Ollie

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If that was "slightly less rude" than I don't know what to say. I've made an effort to calmly respond to every criticism I have received. I took an hour out of my valuable time (I run a company) to film a video. I have coherently explained my method, explained that I'm not good at any of the speed and BLD stuff (and admire people who are) and I was just proposing a new idea for the community. First of all, @Ollie, you don't know me, you don't know anything about what I have done or my experiences, so why are you judging my legitimacy off of a personal experience that you had with a completely different person? I just wanted to contribute to the community. There will be a full uncut video soon, but your mere "It can't be done" philosophy is quite exactly the philosophy that deters and prevents innovation. This methodology is new, I get that. I acknowledge that my first video was not convincing. I acknowledge that I made mistakes in the second, but to make that an excuse and justification to attack my dignity and me as a person is just illogical and kind of a mean thing to do. You haven't even given this method ten minutes of your attention. It was hard for me to visualize the cube at first, but I've been working on it for a YEAR. I did my research, I used all sorts of different memorization techniques that work for more advanced memo and you just walk up and shoot down something you haven't looked into without giving it a proper chance is wrong, just because you've been active on the forums longer.

People say things are impossible all of the time. Verdes made the "impossible" V Cubes, Pasteur proved that spontaneous generation didn't make sense, there are countless instances where the impossible became possible, and that innovation is what drives human society.

I'm not trying to equate my method for solving a Rubik's cube blindfolded with Plato's Republic, but the same logic applies, just at a much more trivial level.

Sorry, it's not in my nature to be rude or contradictory. I'm only responding to attacks that you made to me personally out of the blue.

It has become evident that there are people here who don't care about my method or my research, and instead attack my dignity. I am seriously contemplating ceasing my contributions to cubing in general. I would however like to thank those that have taken the time to explain the general skeptical mood of this community, but I do think that isn't the right kind of setting for my ideas or work.

Thanks again everyone

I'm not judging the legitimacy off of a single personal experience alone, I listed 4-5 valid reasons to think you're cheating. It was merely an example that even exceptional people don't have the kinds of mental representations you're describing, even with years of practice.

I'm saying those skills aren't as transferable as you're making out they are. I also happen to know a lot of chess players. My neuroscience dissertation was on executive functions and Rubik's cube solvers (and maybe I know a thing or two about BLD and memory, if we're waving our credentials around) so this definitely isn't me attacking you with no basis.

I read your explanation and took the time to analyse your video and I think have enough to think that you're being dishonest, in the exact way I'm not sure. I hope you prove me wrong and that you suddenly don't get another convenient camera malfunction.

Again, I used a technique that allows the user to memorize a 52 card deck in thirty eight seconds (current world record) and multiple universities have been investigating. BLD single, double or triple piece swaps (commutators) on a Rubik's cube can't compete.
The world record is 16 seconds and the guy doesn't use any particularly advanced methods that multiple universities are investigating. No-one in memory sports is. It uses pretty much the same mnemonic techniques that have been around for centuries.

The record was 21s in 2010 and used a two-card system which isn't complex to actually apply, so you're either spectacularly misinformed or you're lying through your teeth.
 

mark49152

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I would also like to see you prove your ability to track a mental cube in a way that cannot be faked. Maybe do what @bubbagrub suggested above. You should use an online scrambler that does not allow scrambles to be loaded, and make sure the video shows you generating the scramble, so nobody can accuse you of preparing your solution beforehand. Then if you can apply that scramble to a solved cube in your head on video (unedited) while talking us through what you are visualising and how the cube state is changing, without the use of a physical cube, that would convince me.

If you can do this you have a remarkable skill, and you have a chance to show it by doing what we suggest. Set aside the scepticism you have received so far and just go for it. I hope you can do it and am looking forward to seeing you succeed.
 

Thom S.

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If I wanted to fake something, why wouldn't I fake a BLD 17x17 solve or something that was more impressive/hadn't been done before, I mean there are BLD 9x9 solves on the internet.

The amount of disbelief you get from doing speedBLD vs. 17x17 BLD is a bit different

I was hoping that my method could be used by top BLD solvers as a subset, I just wanted to help out the community.

If your method is really just speedBLD, it's useless for real BLD

By that logic i'm sure if Giles Roux posted the first thread on his new "intuitive method" and block building hadn't been explored we would all think it was too inconvenient and hard

We did

Again, I used a technique that allows the user to memorize a 52 card deck in thirty eight seconds (current world record)

Ben Pridmore did 24.xx in 2009 and even that's outdated
 

One Wheel

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I understand the method you're describing, and I believe that it is possible, if very difficult and not very useful. What you have not convinced me of is that that you're doing and what you're saying are the same thing. In particular I note the position of the cube while solving relative to the blindfold. Most blindfolded solvers hang their heads while solving (though not universally). You hold your head up and the cube low, in a position where it would be possible to peek under the blindfold. If particular note is 3:10 in your second video, where you tilt your head up. This could be trying to recall something, or it could be trying to get a better view of the cube under the blindfold. Not saying you're cheating, but you understand how I can't rule it out.

This would be really cool if it's true, so I want it to be real. Here's how I suggest you prove it is:

Best option: go to a competition and demonstrate it there. Be sure to record the demonstration, have someone hold a card between your face and the cube, and (ideally) borrow a blindfold from someone known in the cubing community but unknown to you, perhaps the delegate or organizer of the competition.

Second best: make your tutorial video explaining how you do it, but also include full footage (could be a separate video) of another solve, this time with someone holding a demonstrably opaque sheet or card between your face and the puzzle, just so there is redundancy in case you accidentally peek under the blindfold. I would find it difficult to believe that you would be unable to do the first option, though. If you've got the resources to go to Morocco on spring break you've probably got the resources to get to a competition in the next couple of months.

Good luck! I hope you can prove this is real, it'd be a fantastic skill.
 

Thom S.

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I took an hour out of my valuable time (I run a company) to film a video.

Let's put the other things aside, what kind of company do you run at the age of 15?

Also, it's been said that things don't line up exactly, but let's recall.


You make a scetchy video which gives a lot of debate of wether or not it's real and the explanation isn't very clear.
You make a second video which ic better but as others stated still scetchy.
You talk about how it's archieved and things aren't completely adding up
You talk about a third video which incidentally cannot be seen
And the worst of all, you lied about a World Record

Be honest, that just sounds lied.

But on another note
I believe you with the mental cube, I can follow Square-1 scrambles in my head and know the shape/algorithms and know the result(wouldn't say that's special tho), but it's the way you describe it that is more unreal. Let's just explain every detail what's going on inside your head(and I'd love to see that following a scramble video, I guess, I'll try that too) it seems like your text explanations don't get your message across.
 
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