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Should 3x3x3 With Feet Remain an Official WCA Event?

Which option describes you best?


  • Total voters
    484

cmhardw

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How could there be any truly objective arguments for removing or keeping an event?

No, I'm serious. What's the criterion for whether something's an event? Why solving with feet and not solving with elbows? Why 4BLD and not 4OH? Why Rubik's Clock and not Rubik's Fifteen? The truth is, there's no objective standard. There is nothing you can prove about an event (with statistics or mathematics) that will give the WCA no choice but to add or remove the event. We have added and removed events over the years by more or less following the community's feelings, and the set of events we have now is certainly somewhat arbitrary. It's certainly not the most interesting or mathematically pure or difficult puzzles, and it's probably not even the most popular either, if you discount the huge popularity boost that an event gets just by being official. So if you want to add or remove an event, you can't argue that it does or does not match the requirements an event needs to have, because there is no such concept.

If the number of competitions with an event steadily decline over the course of over a year up to the point where no one actually competes or wants to organize a competition with that event anymore, seems somewhat an objective argument to remove an event.

I think the argument cubizh gives is a good, objective, measure of the relative popularity of an event as viewed by the community. If an event was hosted less and less frequently over time, I think that could be used as an objective argument for its removal.

I think qqwref makes a great case that there really is no objective measure to argue for the inclusion of an event.

--edit--

On second thought, qqwref, how would you feel about the following situation:

A new puzzle is invented, call it puzzle P, and is currently unofficial. Over a period of two years this puzzle is hosted with increasing frequency around the world as an unofficial event at many officially sanctioned WCA events.

I would argue that this could be an objective measure of the popularity of a puzzle as viewed by a portion of the community. Basically, I think this would be evidence that could be used by the WCA board in favor of the side that wants to include event with puzzle P as an official WCA event.
 
Last edited:

Mike Hughey

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How could there be any truly objective arguments for removing or keeping an event?

I think there has been a truly objective argument for removing events: Magic and Master Magic. In those cases, the objective argument was that the events were too challenging to judge properly - it was probably possible to judge them properly, but it was too challenging to enforce at all our competitions. For that reason, the events were removed.

That to me is an objective argument for removing an event.

And as for my subjective opinion, I would prefer that we never remove an event unless we have an objective reason to remove the event, so I would prefer that we not remove any of the current events. But I admit that is purely my subjective opinion.
 

kcl

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I think there has been a truly objective argument for removing events: Magic and Master Magic. In those cases, the objective argument was that the events were too challenging to judge properly - it was probably possible to judge them properly, but it was too challenging to enforce at all our competitions. For that reason, the events were removed.

That to me is an objective argument for removing an event.

And as for my subjective opinion, I would prefer that we never remove an event unless we have an objective reason to remove the event, so I would prefer that we not remove any of the current events. But I admit that is purely my subjective opinion.

I agree entirely with this. People practice the event. It is held from time to time. Why take it away? We're all thought of as nerds anyway, it isn't like the Cubing image in the press makes us seem all badass.
 
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But H perm is a special case, isn't it? There are a lot of pretty good algs for H with different move sets. In your list, I have seen people use the third one for OH (albeit executed differently) and I myself use it for sim.

As you mentioned, the difference between RFLB and RULD is just a rotation. So I would be surprised to hear that for feetsolvers most of OLL/PLL had to be replaced with new algs, or that F2L was done totally differently than in OH. The biggest difference is that turns have to be done even more slowly than in OH, which certainly does affect what turns a good solver would want to do, but it doesn't seem like a big enough change to have people develop entirely new ideas and techniques, like we have seen for OH.

Yeah the H perm is a somewhat special case. Perhaps feetsolving isn't significantly different from OH, but at least it's different from 2H in the same way OH is. I'm not sure what the "new ideas and techniques" are in OH, but I feel like most changes that are useful for OH would also be useful for feetsolving because of 2-gen/4-gen. With regards to RULD, a feetsolver can execute L and D without rotations. For F2L, it means that I can less awkwardly do "D" turns for stuff like keyhole. Then again, I'm not sure how much time world-class OH solvers lose on rotations like that.
 

Ranzha

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What is the image of cubing?

Tim.

After reading through this thread, I realise that the media arguments are pretty moot. This said, I feel there's a huge disparity between how non-cubers view speedsolving and what cubers know is speedsolving, primarily rooted from the disparity in the view on the cube itself.

The biggest things that most people don't understand when they first pick a cube up are that (a) the cube is made of different kinds of pieces with stickers fixed to them, (b) the centre sticker of each face is a fixed reference point, (c) there is only one of each piece and only one solved location for each piece, and (d) destroying your progress is not only a fixable and okay thing to do, but a necessary thing to do to progress further.

These seem like fundamental concepts to those who have solved the cube at least once. However, there is an epiphanic shock on noncubers' faces when I inform them of these key ideas.

And then comes the frustration. In the video posted of Feliks on that IQ show, the host literally smashes a cube to make manifest the idea of frustration. With some direction, people may be able to realise that the cube isn't cryptic or insurmountable and maybe better appreciate the achievements of cubers like Feliks et al.

On another note comes the Cube20 news. Sure, everyone heard that the cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer, but I don't think the public really appreciates what went into the findings as some cubers might.

tl;dr Improving the public outlook on the cube by making widely known some fundamental ideas about the cube may allow for informed appreciation of cubing achievements.
 

Dene

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Even though a lot of people don't like it, a lot of people do like it. How will competitions be improved if it is removed?

Seeing as you've gone and bumped this dead thread, you asked for it...

Your reasoning is horrible. Therefore any conclusions you come to based on your reasoning are unjustified.
 

Tempus

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Seeing as you've gone and bumped this dead thread, you asked for it...

Your reasoning is horrible. Therefore any conclusions you come to based on your reasoning are unjustified.
His underlying reasoning is sound, he just omitted certain salient parts from his expression of it. Allow me to rephrase it into a clearer expression of what I believe he meant: "Even though a lot of people don't like it, MORE people DO like it, as evinced by the current poll results." At the time of this writing, 42.52% voted to retain the event, whereas only 37.54% voted to eliminate it. You've lost the election, Dene.
 

qqwref

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Short competitions are certainly easier to organize and run (and help out in) without feet. You don't have to move the timers and tables and stuff around, clean and deodorize things so people who don't love feet aren't disgusted, etc. while still keeping to the fixed number of hours you have the venue for.

Of course, bigBLD/multiBLD/FMC also make competitions harder to run, but at least (IMO) those have a lot of additional technique and skill above and beyond normal speedsolving, whereas feet doesn't.
 

SolveThatCube

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Short competitions are certainly easier to organize and run (and help out in) without feet. You don't have to move the timers and tables and stuff around, clean and deodorize things so people who don't love feet aren't disgusted, etc. while still keeping to the fixed number of hours you have the venue for.

Of course, bigBLD/multiBLD/FMC also make competitions harder to run, but at least (IMO) those have a lot of additional technique and skill above and beyond normal speedsolving, whereas feet doesn't.

This really bugs me. How can you say feet doesn't require skill? You saying Gabriel Pereira Campanha broke WR without skill and technique?
 

CHJ

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Feet is similar to standard 3x3 and even more so to OH.
so what qq is saying is that 3BLD isn't as closely similar to bigBLD and that FMC isn't that similar to standard 3x3. Us feet solvers practice and try to improve with new techniques and practicing our skills just as BLD'ers do or for any other puzzle. Yes it takes a while to set up, just as FMC does, maybe not as much but still that factor, and if it seems disgusting, deal with it, not like you're actually competing in it.
as for the debate on how it looks to people who aren't cubers, NO ONE CARES!!!!! they wanna cube sure, why should feet be a problem to them.
now for the hassle of timing for events and stuff, 1 day comps yeah i can agree but who are you to complain if feet is there and something else you want isn't there, why don't you organise your own and stop complaining to the people who go out of their own ways of organisation.
now this rant of mine is probably been mentioned like twice over but it needs to be done, this thread shouldn't even be here and people should stop having a go at the WCA.
 

cubizh

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This really bugs me. How can you say feet doesn't require skill? You saying Gabriel Pereira Campanha broke WR without skill and technique?
He's just stating his oppinion. Other people may argue that bigBLD is basically regular BLD with a lot more memorization, there's not a lot of technique involved.
It's very subjective and easy to give a biased oppinion when you are not into what it takes to be fast at an event.

Regarding the time it takes to move stuff around, one can potentially point out that in the time it takes to scramble and verify a big cube like 5x5 (for 5BLD) is roughly the same time it takes to scramble for feet + clean and move a stackmat from the floor to the table or vice-versa.
 

cc9tough

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Of course, bigBLD/multiBLD/FMC also make competitions harder to run, but at least (IMO) those have a lot of additional technique and skill above and beyond normal speedsolving, whereas feet doesn't.
by that logic we should also remove OH since its so similar to normal speed solving.
 
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