Regulation 5b2 is impossible to follow?

[Malkom]

• 5b2) Any repair to a puzzle must not give the competitor any advantage in solving the puzzle. Penalty: disqualification of the attempt (DNF).

How are you supposed to follow this regulation? If you for example get a corner twist resulting in a sune were the middle corner is solved, would twisting that corner result in a DNF because sune is faster than pi? I can understand the reason we have this regulation, if this didn't exist some people maybe would try to cornertwist during LS to be able twist another corner to force better OLLs.
But does this mean that the solver always have to adjust the cube to the worst possible scenario?
The fairest way I can see is that the competitor have to adjust the cube to the state before the incident, but that may be hard to rember and if it happens early in the solve it is almost impossible to know what state the cube should be in.
The best example I can imagine is a megaminx solve, during one of your first pairs you accidentally twist a S2L corner. You keep on going since another corner could twist and according to (my interpretation of) reg 5b3c you're only allowed to twist a single corner. When you reach LL you have only one corner twisted, what should you do?
Twisting the unsolved corner seems to give you an advantage, but if would've twisted another corner you may have gotten a PLL skip that would give you a bigger advantage.
The piece you originally twisted has been treated like a correctly oriented piece so should it be seen as two incorrectly solved pieces and a corner twist?

At the very least there should be something in the guidelines to clear this up because quite a lot of people might have cheated by mistake.

 

[Sajwo]

As long as you twisted corner by accident you can later on twist whatever corner you like, because you are not able to indicate the specific corner and the direction it twisted.. Even if end up with pure Headlights as your OLL, but you had twist-pop before, there is no way for the judge to differentiate if this is your final position or you just got lucky with permutation of the pieces. Therefore you can twist that corner, which gives you "PLL Skip". Of course, maybe there was some cases like that, but certainly wouldn't call this cheating. After all, corner twists are(or were?) pain in the ass and often it's the worst solve in the average anyway. Doing algs is always faster than recognizing that you have corner twist and manually fixing that, not mentioning that if you feel the twist on your finger, you go instantly mad and get disoriented.

And yes, 5b2 is stupid and impossible to follow

 

[Competition Cuber]

• 5b2) Any repair to a puzzle must not give the competitor any advantage in solving the puzzle. Penalty: disqualification of the attempt (DNF).

How are you supposed to follow this regulation? If you for example get a corner twist resulting in a sune were the middle corner is solved, would twisting that corner result in a DNF because sune is faster than pi? I can understand the reason we have this regulation, if this didn't exist some people maybe would try to cornertwist during LS to be able twist another corner to force better OLLs.
But does this mean that the solver always have to adjust the cube to the worst possible scenario?
The fairest way I can see is that the competitor have to adjust the cube to the state before the incident, but that may be hard to rember and if it happens early in the solve it is almost impossible to know what state the cube should be in.
The best example I can imagine is a megaminx solve, during one of your first pairs you accidentally twist a S2L corner. You keep on going since another corner could twist and according to (my interpretation of) reg 5b3c you're only allowed to twist a single corner. When you reach LL you have only one corner twisted, what should you do?
Twisting the unsolved corner seems to give you an advantage, but if would've twisted another corner you may have gotten a PLL skip that would give you a bigger advantage.
The piece you originally twisted has been treated like a correctly oriented piece so should it be seen as two incorrectly solved pieces and a corner twist?

At the very least there should be something in the guidelines to clear this up because quite a lot of people might have cheated by mistake.

Yeah, seriously, good question. I think that it's not technically impossible, but is very, very hard to follow.

EDIT: Nice job spelling "impossible" in the title.

 

[Malkom]

EDIT: Nice job spelling "impossible" in the title.

Isn't that how you spell it?

 

[ronaldm]

It's not in the guidelines, and I don't know the backstory behind the wording of 5b2, but I'm 99% sure that that regulation was not written specifically for a corner twist.

5b2 does apply however when you have a pop, especially on bigger cubes. For instance: When you get a pop on 7x7 while you're still making your centres, you can not put all the pieces back in such a way that end up with fully solved centres and a couple of created edges. That would give an advantage (from a solving perspective, time-wise there will likely never be a real advantage), so you'd have to put the pieces back somewhat at random, in a similar state of being solved as when you popped.

 

[WACWCA]

I think it applies more to pops, like you can't orient the LL if you had a dog case, and you can't assemble it solved just to make sure you don't have parity. For corners I think it just applies to only twisting the corner you twisted, or only doing 1 in general if you forget. Corner twisting is to hard to check but pops are pretty obvious

 

[JoshJumble]

I don't think it's impossible, but it's pretty darn close, at least for corner twists.

A solution could be to change the wording of the regulation to:

• 5b2) Any repair to a puzzle must not give the competitor a significant advantage in solving the puzzle. Penalty: disqualification of the attempt (DNF).

If it's modified this way, small advantages (Sune vs Pi) won't be penalized, whereas bigger advantages (G perm vs solved) would be.

Though there's the problem that "significant" can't really be defined in this context, it's more a matter of opinion than anything else.