PetrusQuber
Legend
So for a school assignment, I'm writing an essay cubing. I have the itnorduction and history done so far, suggestions for sections? Things like 'Hardware, Competitions, Community', etc. Here's the script:
Opinion on Essay
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Etotheipi
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Wait, are we supposed to be critiquing the writing or the cubing?
PetrusQuber
Legend
What do you mean by the cubing?
Also jsut do whatever you want, critique if you want, suggest ideas, etc.
Etotheipi
Veteran
Ok. =D
I don't really think that should be in there tbh, people can understand that your first paragraph is the introduction without you telling them =PPetrusQuber said:
Also, maybe add a conclusion paragraph, your current last paragraph continues the idea of cubing in different time periods but isn't really a conclusion. It would be a good conclusion if the essay was comparing cubing back in the day to cubing now, but your essay mainly focuses on the back in the day.
I'm A Cuber
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I sure do love my 3x30
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Yeah and also about comps and hanging out with friends and stuff like that, you only focused on the early day of cubing and the Rubik's craze of the 80's. Writing more moderns things on stuff like innovations, new methods and modern speedcubers is definitely recommended.
I would suggest proffreading it for the errors, like you wrote 3x30 I stead of 3x3 after you have done that, I would put it in a grammar checking thing.
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ok, use the free grammarly
Grammarly wants you for their revenue
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That's cheating! this is a school assignment.
uh-oh, I totally don't use it for all of my school assignments
ProStar
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No it's not. I'd totally use Grammarly, except usually I do an good job with grammar anyway
BenChristman1
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You forgot the period Mr. "I'm so good at grammar."
Like some others have said, I would make the "Cubing Today" section longer. Maybe include some recent WRs, and some world-class cubers?
ProStar
Legend
You forgot the period Mr. "I'm so good at grammar."
last time I checked this isn't school
PetrusQuber
Legend
That’s not even 1/4 of the essay lol I’m writing more. Ok I’ll cut that out @Etotheipi .
Where is that?
ProStar
Legend
PetrusQuber
Legend
Ok nevermind I found it. Here's it so far again:
Also I just installed Grammarly, so I think I've got all the mistakes here.Cubing
Cubing. This is one of my hobbies. Cubing is short for basically, ‘solving the Rubik’s Cube’. The standard Rubik’s cube is a 3x3x3 arrangement of blocks, with colours on them. The solved state is when all the pieces/colours are in their correct place - matching them up with everything else. Solving the cube on your own is hard. Very few people have ever done it, and it takes a lot of time and patience. The cube’s inventor, Erno Rubik, managed to solve it on his own after over a month of dedication. For most cubers though, this is not how they started out. The growth of cubing, and the internet, inevitably lead to methods being shared around online, and in between individual people - making it much easier to learn. Nowadays, you can search up ‘How to Solve the Rubik’s Cube’, and loads of tutorials will come up, each with various steps and procedures to follow out depending on what the cube looks like.
History
Early years
The Rubik’s cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian architect Erno Rubik. The cube had been originally made as a working model to explain three dimensional geometry to Rubik’s students. It was made out of wood, and twice the weight of cubes nowadays. Similar concepts had been invented before, such as Larry Nichols’ 2x2 cube (a smaller version of the traditional 3x3 held together by strong magnets, and Frank Fox’s spherical 3x3 ‘amusement device’, but none of these really took off. Rubik received his patent in 1975, and the cube was released to the Hungarian public in 1977. Toy company Ideal helped Rubik release the cube across the world after that, and by 1980, it was everywhere.
It won the Toy of the Year award and was sold to over 100 million people by 1982. The aforementioned Larry Nichols’ employer sued Ideal for patent infringement that same year, and in 1984, Ideal lost the suit but immediately appealed. The appeals courts in 1986 decided to overturn the decision that the 3x3 Rubik’s Cube infringed on Nichols’ patent, however the Rubik’s 2x2 Pocket Cube was deemed an infringement.
The Rubik’s Revenge (a 4x4 cube) was also released in 1981. Rubik didn’t invent it, but allowed it to be named after him to attract fans of the 3x3.
Many people still didn’t know how to solve the cube. There were a few people who had developed their own methods, and a few that had found the written guides and tutorials of others, but most of the population were dumb founded. However, in just 1982, the first Rubik’s Cube World Championship was held in Budapest, where it had all started. 20 people from 20 countries’ national championships came, and many would be pioneers in the following decades’ speedcubing era. Jessica Fridrich, representing the Czech Republic was there. She is known nowadays for being one of the inventors of the popular CFOP/Fridrich method (stands for Cross, First Two Layers, Orientate Last Layer, Permute Last Layer), which is used by almost all speedcubers nowadays. Lars Petrus, representing Sweden, was also there. He used his own unique method (which I now use) called Petrus, which would be almost as popular as Fridrich in few years to come. In the end, American Minh Thai won, with a best time of 22.95 seconds - seemingly impossible to the rest of the world.
New types of puzzles, and variations would also be created in the following years of the cube’s release. Uwe Meffert had constructed wooden puzzles similar to those of the 3x3 around the same time as Rubik, but hadn’t thought much of it, until Rubik’s released his cubes. He bought his puzzles to a Japanese toymaker, and 90 million Pyraminxes (tetrahedron like puzzles) were released, along with other cubes/puzzles. He would go on to create over a hundred puzzles in the next decades. He is considered to be almost as important as Rubik in pioneering the Rubik’s Cube.
Another person, named Tony Fisher would work with Mefferts to mass produce other variations, such as bandaged cubes (where certain cubies on the cube are stuck together, making some moves impossible if it interacts with the bandaged pair) and cuboids, like the 3x3x4.
The Quiet Period
Unable to solve it, many people would forget about the cube, and it would eventually come to rest somewhere in a deep, dark cupboard, unsolved. However, the speedcubing community was still going strong. The growth of the Internet led to people sharing their methods and techniques, discussing how to solve certain parts of the cube faster, and more. The aforementioned Jessica Fridrich would begin to develop CFOP, inventing the Last Layer algorithms (sequences of moves that do specific things) for OLL and PLL, which means Orientate Last Layer and Permute Last Layer. She would also begin to optimise F2L (First Two Layers) algorithms, finding hard/difficult cases and spending some time figuring out the best way to solve it if it came up in a solve. Petrus also developed his method around the same time as Fridrich, and the two methods were posted online towards the end of the 20th century, making the knowledge accessible to cubers everywhere. The Speedsolving Yahoo Group would also be created in 1999, allowing speedcubers to connect with each other, sharing tips, tricks, etc.
The WCA was founded in 2004 by Ron van Bruchem and Tyson Mao, which stood for the World Cube Association. Competitions would be held by the WCA, and the WCA website would provide access to speedsolving World Records, rankings, and most importantly, the regulations - which would often be consulted in competition, for example, whenever a competitor is suspected of cheating, you’re not sure about whether the cube is solved, etc. Another World Championships would be held in 2003 and 2004. The 2003 World Championships would be won by Dan Knights, with a perfect average time of 20.00 seconds. He was followed closely by Jessica Fridrich and David Wesley.
Speedcubing today
Things are very different from back in the day. We have vastly superior methods, superior hardware (cubes), a vastly different type of community, and completely different world records. I could’ve thrashed everybody in the world championships if I had a time machine to go back to them. Nowadays, the WR average is 4 times faster than Dan Knights' 20.00, and the single is 3.47 - a time people legitimately thought would've been impossible even a couple of years back. And you'll see pretty much nobody from those times still cubing and vying for world records now, against the like suchs as Feliks Zemdegs and Max Park.
Community
Cubing wouldn’t be that fun if you were alone in it. Nobody to ask for help, nobody to talk to about achievements, lots of people thinking you’re a weirdo. Luckily, that isn’t the case. Statistics say that 5.8% of the world can solve the cube, which is around 1/20 - not that bad a number, right? Even considering it might be inaccurate, some people might have given up on it, and some might not be very active, that’s still a decent amount. So maybe you’ll find a couple of other people like you in your cubing career.
Better still, you can find lots of people in the online world - no restrictions on being able to meet people other than if you have access to the internet. speedsolving.com is quite popular, almost 40K people have joined throughout the years, and quite a few are still active, me being one of them. Reddit’s r/cubers is also quite big, a lot more active than speedsolving.com. There are also many big cubing Discord servers. You can even find cubers on obscure websites such as Scratch! Being able to chat to other cubers is really important, especially when you start out. You’ll probably have lots of questions, lots of enquiries, and if you can chat to other experienced cubers, you can be answered. Plus, it’s more fun when you’re in a community - you can share personal progress, your records, and people will generally be quite nice, and congratulate you, etc. Also, chatting is just fun
There’s also another way to chat to other cubers. You know I mentioned competitions in the History section a while back? That’s right. Get yourself on the WCA website, sign up, go to competitions, select your country, and boom, it’ll show all the competitions nearby, with all the information you need, such as the date, time, location, events, people, rankings, etc. All you’ll need to do is wait until registration opens (if it’s already open just skip this), pick your events, pay a registration fee, and you’re in! (Unless you do it too late, in which case you’ll be put on the waiting list). All you need to do is turn up, and there’ll be lots of other cubers there, you can socialise, race, and compete!
Hardware
Why you need good cubes
Good cubes are important in the world of cubing. With my main cube, I can easily average 13 seconds. Give me an ancient Rubik’s Brand from years back, my times can very well go up to over 20 seconds.
Why is this? Well, there are two main things which determine how fast a solve is. Efficiency, and turn speed. If you have really good turn speed, but bad efficiency, you could be turning really fast, but taking over a 100 moves to solve the cube, which is bad, and cancels out your extremely fast turn speed in terms of times. If you have really good efficiency, but bad turn speed, you might be able to solve the cube in 45 moves, but can only turn the cube at a tortoise rate of 1 turn a second, again, leading to slow times. Bad cubes can take a toll on both, but affect turning a lot more. You see, modern speed cubes are designed to be turned easily, fast, and controllably. Therefore, we adapt our finger tricks to that turn style, for optimal turns. But with cubes like Rubik’s Brands, which are only designed to be robust, controllable, and pop resistant, it’s very hard to easily fingertrick a turn, and your turn speed is slowed down considerably. It will also take some getting used to, most cubs will turn with a small touch - a stiff cube will take your entire hand’s strength to turn. So that’s one way it affects your solve. The other way is more minimal, but can still be bad. Recognition. We need to look at the cube, and recognise cases, when to do algorithms, etc. If a cube has the wrong colour scheme from what we are used to, we will be confused. Maybe I’ve been taught to look for white pieces and solve them on the bottom layer when I start. A bad, dollar store cube could easily have no white - maybe it’s replaced with another colour. And some colours could be swapped with others - say I wanted to find the Red Green White corner. It isn’t even there, since Red and Green are opposite in this weird, horrific colour scheme.
Plus, the way cubes look can take a toll on your recognition. The Rubik’s Brand looks like a black cube with plastic colored tiles stuck into it. Most good speedcubes don’t look like that. One common design choice is to have a black cube, with coloured stickers on it - black stickered cubes. This allows for easy replacement of colours for your preferences, and manufacturing ease. Another common design is the same thing, but with a white cube as the base. Sometimes you can find limited edition cubes with colours such as, say, green as the background, and even transparent cubes. But by far the most common type of cube is the stickerless cube. Basically, there is no base - the colours are actually part of the cube, part of the segments. This allows for a full fitted look, and technically helps with recognition, since the bigger the area of colour, the easier it is to know what the colour is instantly.
Another type of cube you’ll never see used in the speedcubing world is the carbon fibre cube. Many Amazon companies seem to like stealing other companies cubes, restickering it with carbon fibre stickers, and selling it as their own. Basically, you get some balck stickers made from carbon fibre with ‘cool’ patterns on them, and sticker a stickerless cube with them. This does nothing except vastly increase colour recognition time, as there is virtually zero colour except for on the edges, and maybe make some people think the cube looks ‘rad’ and ‘cutting edge’. So yeah.
Companies that produce speedcubes
Rubik’s Brands are bad for speedcubing. They’re more designed to be robust, controllable, and pop resistant, as stated above - family friendly. And it’s not looking like Rubik’s wants to make better cubes - they don’t need to, since the majority of normal people buy from them, and they have a monopoly. So it’s up to other companies to produce speed cubes. All of them are Chinese by the way. Lets look at some of them:
Yuxin - famous for their cheap and budget friendly prices, coming with nevertheless decent cubes. Known for their Little Magic line in almost every event (2x2-9x9, Megaminx, Square One, etc).
YJ (YongJun) - famous for very good cubes viable against more heavily priced flagships, at an affordable rate. Known for good value cubes, their dominance in higher order cubes such as 5x5 and 6x6, and their two lines - the MGC line, very good at decent prices, and their Yu line (starts with Yu - Yuhu, Yulong, Yushi, etc).
Moyu - famous for very reliable and solid flagship cubes, and their subset budget brand Cubing Classroom, bringing in pretty good cubes in the 4-10 pound range. Used to be a subset of YJ, now independent, their GTS line and WRM line are famous for being some of the best in their categories, mainly focusing on NxNs and a few side events.
GAN - Famous for very premium-like cubes, their wide range of customisablity, great flagships, and expensive prices. Mainly focused on 3x3, starting to look into 2x2 and 4x4, lots of similar high end cubes at every price point imaginable past £25. Known for their complicated looking numbering and letter system, such as with their flaghsip, the GAN 356 XS. The first number is the order of cube (3x3), and the last 2 letters are the size (in millimetres). The letters are cosmetic, to distinguish in between cubes. The more letters, probably
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It was so long, that I started perspiring halfway through. Anyway, I still see a couple of mistakes, such as the word "vying" I suggest rereading it once again.
PetrusQuber
Legend
I think vying is a word...
Etotheipi
Veteran
Yes, use it, then you get extra points for vocab XD
Oh, I thought it wasn't. Also it says cubs in one of the sections
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