Older cubers discussions

[newtonbase]

Oh, I got this lovely 3bld scramble last night but I was just doing tracing practice and not a full blown solve. Three solved edges on the right face (scrambled from solving orientation). L F R2 F B U L U B R2 U F2 R2 U L2 F2 D2 R2 U' Fw' Uw2

Got a 1:30 bit should have been quicker.

 

[pglewis]

Some of the details I've considered for a shared image database for brainstorming:

* Import/export, needs to support XML, CSV, and JSON at a minimum

* Need a way to mark images as private. Some images will be personal and not useful for sharing and I'm sure there are some that people would simply rather keep private.

* Cannot make assumptions about letter scheme, or even the alphabet used if possible. Internationalization is a somewhat weak area for me but I consider it vital for the non-native English speakers to have value as well.

* Tagging/categorization system. Some people may be building PAO lists, so a faceted search that allows narrowing the results to actions would be great, as one example.

* Some way to give preference to age and cultural bias. I'm an old guy and the actors or musicians that resonate for me are generally from the 70s to early 90s. The UK folks may have a great personality for a pair that doesn't mean anything to me or the Polish blders. Having a setting for general age and cultural bias might work to give preference to results that are more likely to mean something to you vs. a raw dump in arbitrary order.

 

[SpartanSailor]

Got a 1:30 bit should have been quicker.

I didn't time myself, but I ran the memo only twice and then did it right away... I'd be willing to bet I was WAY faster than my timed PB of 7:25.xx.

 

[mark49152]

Oh, I got this lovely 3bld scramble last night but I was just doing tracing practice and not a full blown solve. Three solved edges on the right face (scrambled from solving orientation). L F R2 F B U L U B R2 U F2 R2 U L2 F2 D2 R2 U' Fw' Uw2

53.43 but I did a wrong comm and had to undo/redo it. Should have been well sub-50.

Nice to see so much BLD talk on here recently, and awesome to see you starting up the BLD again @Selkie!

Here's my first 20-attempt since mid-November. I expected dreadful accuracy but was pleasantly surprised. Am starting to ramp up MBLD practice again ahead of Guildford in March. I've spent the last few weeks replacing the majority of my corner comms with speed-optimal algs, and have avoided any other BLD practice because I knew I'd just revert to algs I'm comfortable with and that would disrupt my learning. After a ton of searching, learning, drilling and over 2000 corners-only solves, my corner execution is back to where it was, but with much better algs. This MBLD had pretty good accuracy and time, for me, but the best thing about it was that for the most part I used the new algs, with little hesitation and very few mistakes, and only a couple of reversions to old algs.

 

[JanW]

Oh, I got this lovely 3bld scramble last night but I was just doing tracing practice and not a full blown solve. Three solved edges on the right face (scrambled from solving orientation). L F R2 F B U L U B R2 U F2 R2 U L2 F2 D2 R2 U' Fw' Uw2

I don't scramble in solving direction and one of the solved edges turned out to be my buffer, but nice scramble anyway! 2:20, which would be my fastest success since I started relearning bld this year.

 

[h2f]

Oh, I got this lovely 3bld scramble last night but I was just doing tracing practice and not a full blown solve. Three solved edges on the right face (scrambled from solving orientation). L F R2 F B U L U B R2 U F2 R2 U L2 F2 D2 R2 U' Fw' Uw2

Wow. Awsome scramble: 40.83 [16.71]. Sadly it doesnt count as PB. For corners the comms were not bad (but not the best), but for edges all easy comms.

 

[JanW]

2/3 MBld in 20:24 (a couple of small mistakes on 3rd cube). That would be good enough to get an official result, right? I know, I know, I've been talking forever about dragging myself to a comp... I promise, as soon as I get a 5/5 I'll sign up for the next one.

My letter scheme is a bit odd. When I first learned blind I watched some youtube tutorial (probably Noah) and about a week or two later I decided to try some in practice. Then I made up my letter scheme like I remembered it was done in the video, but I guess my memory failed me that time. I don't go clockwise, I read the faces like a book, left -> right, rows up -> down. Corners on any given face are ordered UL-UR-DL-DR, edges U-L-R-D. My faces are also in different order than most people seem to do it. The order is U-L-R-F-B-D. Don't know the logic there or why I did it that way..

With that letter scheme and UF and UFR buffers, my buffers have the stickers DM and DNI. With D on both buffer pieces, it would never appear in memo, so a long time ago I replaced Q with D. That totally breaks all logic and order, but since it is the odd one out, it is the easiest letter to remember.

My edge memo uses N but no M while corner memo uses M but no N. It wouldn't be much of a problem for me to replace M in corner memo with N, which would completely free up the letter M. Then I could for example replace X with M. Having M on the bottom face would be no problem. Again it would be a special case, easy to remember. However, I'm wondering if this would possibly cause trouble further down the road. That would mean I have only 22 letters, while most blinders use 24. Two letters less means 90 less letter pairs, a reduction of about 16%. If I ever get to the point where I'd be doing dozens of practice solves/day or large MBld attempts, maybe it is better to have a larger stock of images in use? Has anyone else here, or do you know of any top blinders who would have reduced the amount of letters in use from 24 to 23 or 22?

 

[newtonbase]

Bizarre DNF

 

[Mike Hughey]

2/3 MBld in 20:24 (a couple of small mistakes on 3rd cube). That would be good enough to get an official result, right? I know, I know, I've been talking forever about dragging myself to a comp... I promise, as soon as I get a 5/5 I'll sign up for the next one.

Yes, that's a valid result! Congratulations!

My edge memo uses N but no M while corner memo uses M but no N. It wouldn't be much of a problem for me to replace M in corner memo with N, which would completely free up the letter M. Then I could for example replace X with M. Having M on the bottom face would be no problem. Again it would be a special case, easy to remember. However, I'm wondering if this would possibly cause trouble further down the road. That would mean I have only 22 letters, while most blinders use 24. Two letters less means 90 less letter pairs, a reduction of about 16%. If I ever get to the point where I'd be doing dozens of practice solves/day or large MBld attempts, maybe it is better to have a larger stock of images in use? Has anyone else here, or do you know of any top blinders who would have reduced the amount of letters in use from 24 to 23 or 22?

There are some BLDers who definitely use less than 24, and they often look at those of us with a full 24 or more as silly. But big cubes kind of need 23 for wings and centers (and obliques for greater than 5x5x5), so there's that. And if you decide to do other weird puzzles, you may want even more than that - I have 30 for megaminx, and ideally you should really have 60 for megaminx (well, 59). But 60 x 60 images was too much for me.

 

[mark49152]

Bizarre DNF

Looks like an r2 rather than l2 during centres, or something like that.

Regarding lettering, yes lots of people reduce or replace letters. Personally I don't, because there are too many cross-puzzle considerations, like Mike said. The important thing is to have an image come to mind immediately for every pair, without hesitation. Switching letters to fit your language might make it easier to come up with matching images in the first place, but if you rely on that during memo you've missed the point. Always use something like Anki to learn the associations so that you don't need to think about it during memo. Ultimately it doesn't matter how your image relates to the letters as long as you recall the association instantly. Prioritize making the images unique, distinct and memorable rather than matching them to letters. For me, IQ is a monocle because the letters look a bit like that. UQ is a sort of slug with a dog's head. X sometimes indicates dead things, like XK dead koala, sometimes it's a Roman numeral like in XV or XC, or sometimes it's a "sk" sound like XB scab. Q is sometimes a "sh" sound as in BQ bush. All of which are nice strong images for me. The infrequency with which the letter combination occurs in language is completely irrelevant once you have an image set learned.

 

[JanW]

Switching letters to fit your language might make it easier to come up with matching images in the first place, but if you rely on that during memo you've missed the point. Always use something like Anki to learn the associations so that you don't need to think about it during memo.

Heh.. this has always been my main problem. I get inspired to do blind once or twice a year, then I relearn it, work my times down to about 2 minutes, decide to finally make a full list of words/images for my letter pairs and ... that's where it stops. I have a partial list in a spreadsheet I started years ago, but whenever I try to complete it, the task feels too overwhelming and daunting. With that in mind, maybe it could be a good idea to remove one more letter from my repertoire, which would make that project feel a bit easier. Possibly enough that I would some day complete it. I do understand the concerns with big blinds, but I'm really not sure if I'll ever get there. I've never been that interested in big cubes anyway, neither sighted or bld. MBld is much more appealing to me than big blinds.

 

[pglewis]

Heh.. this has always been my main problem. I get inspired to do blind once or twice a year, then I relearn it, work my times down to about 2 minutes, decide to finally make a full list of words/images for my letter pairs and ... that's where it stops. I have a partial list in a spreadsheet I started years ago, but whenever I try to complete it, the task feels too overwhelming and daunting. With that in mind, maybe it could be a good idea to remove one more letter from my repertoire, which would make that project feel a bit easier. Possibly enough that I would some day complete it. I do understand the concerns with big blinds, but I'm really not sure if I'll ever get there. I've never been that interested in big cubes anyway, neither sighted or bld. MBld is much more appealing to me than big blinds.

I don't think eliminating one more letter is a huge optimization win, 22x22 is still approaching 500. This is exactly what I'm hoping to be able to address with a the shared image database brainstorming I posted yesterday.

 

[pglewis]

Some of the details I've considered for a shared image database for brainstorming:

* Import/export, needs to support XML, CSV, and JSON at a minimum

* Need a way to mark images as private. Some images will be personal and not useful for sharing and I'm sure there are some that people would simply rather keep private.

* Cannot make assumptions about letter scheme, or even the alphabet used if possible. Internationalization is a somewhat weak area for me but I consider it vital for the non-native English speakers to have value as well.

* Tagging/categorization system. Some people may be building PAO lists, so a faceted search that allows narrowing the results to actions would be great, as one example.

* Some way to give preference to age and cultural bias. I'm an old guy and the actors or musicians that resonate for me are generally from the 70s to early 90s. The UK folks may have a great personality for a pair that doesn't mean anything to me or the Polish blders. Having a setting for general age and cultural bias might work to give preference to results that are more likely to mean something to you vs. a raw dump in arbitrary order.

The main idea here being a site that has all your images. It would allow you to search all public images others have out there for a letter pair and add new ones to your list with a single click.

Another must have would be a flash-card exercise for your personal images (taking the role of what we use Anki for)

 

[JanW]

I'll try to switch tactics with the word list. So far I've been sitting down with the list trying to come up with images, which just doesn't work for me. Instead I'll keep it open in the background while practicing bld and after every solve I can add any good images I've come up with during the last solve. This way it should hopefully gradually fill up and at some point I can figure out the missing ones. In general, I feel like I'm coming up with much better images on the fly while solving than I can think of while staring at an excel spreadsheet.

 

[mark49152]

@JanW: I did kind of the opposite. Every time I struggled with a pair I highlighted the cell red. Then went searching other people's lists and other resources until I had the hard ones covered.

 

[openseas]

I don't think eliminating one more letter is a huge optimization win, 22x22 is still approaching 500. This is exactly what I'm hoping to be able to address with a the shared image database brainstorming I posted yesterday.

Actually, it can be a huge factor for 3BLD. Certain letters (like Q, Z, K, X) are not easy to come up with decent images or can get confused due to the similarity of the sound (Q vs K vs C) - I don't use these for 3BLD (many top cubers are similar).

But as @Mike Hughey mentioned, you need all 23 for big blds - so I have list of letter pairs for all possible combinations for big blds.

 

[SpartanSailor]

Actually, it can be a huge factor for 3BLD. Certain letters (like Q, Z, K, X) are not easy to come up with decent images or can get confused due to the similarity of the sound (Q vs K vs C) - I don't use these for 3BLD (many top cubers are similar).

But as @Mike Hughey mentioned, you need all 23 for big blds - so I have list of letter pairs for all possible combinations for big blds.

very interesting.... of course, my VAST experience of 32 days of learning BLD has taught me so much.

I actually don't mind Q, K and X. I don't have a Z for my 3BLD (and haven't even pretended to do 4BLD...). But "Q" in particular is something I try to get in my memo if I can.

 

[newtonbase]

I really need to do more work on my list. It gets more and more sparse as I move through the alphabet.

3 4BLD DNFs today. Only one recall error. I think it's my centre execution that's letting me down the most. Just needs more practice. 5BLD by Manchester is looking like a stretch at the moment.

 

[JanW]

@JanW: I did kind of the opposite. Every time I struggled with a pair I highlighted the cell red. Then went searching other people's lists and other resources until I had the hard ones covered.

I suppose it will eventually get to that for the last ones. But right now my written list is only around 10% complete, there are so many easy slots to fill still.

 

[mark49152]

I suppose it will eventually get to that for the last ones. But right now my written list is only around 10% complete, there are so many easy slots to fill still.

Which are the pairs that mess up your solves, easy or hard?