Anon's Cubing Progression // Beginner Roux gains

[Anon]

Notice how a different rearrangement of the parentheses gives a J perm: (R U R' F') (R U R' U') (R' F R2 U' R' U')
J, T and Y perms are simply rearrangements of each other.
Then, an F perm is just an R' U' F' setup into a T perm, with a cancellation at the end.
An N perm is just an R U R' U setup into a J perm

In honor of this post, I've added "Jorian's Quest" to my prospective personal goals. Will learning Jb, T, F, Na, or Ub perms help my Roux solves? Nope! But whenever I'm frustrated or bored with Roux, I'll learn a PLL from this list to act as a palate cleanser. (I'll define 'learned' as being able to do the algorithm 10 times from memory with the correct finger tricks at any speed.)

I'm seeing a lot of improvement here, and I think that you could definitely become really good pretty quickly! I learned pretty slowly because I had a chicken-crap method of learning where I just carried a little pamphlet around with me until I understood it instead of actually drilling algs, and I think with your good practice techniques, sub-40 is easily attainable! Roux is a great method to start off with.


Don't doubt yourself about your age versus your skill, look at @Mike Hughey who is 61 and still averaging a solid 15. Good luck!

Thank you Bingus. I appreciate your kind words of encouragement! (Though I'm not sure I have "good practice techniques" lmao XD.)

 

[Mike Hughey]

Actually, LOL, I'm averaging a solid 20. But I do seem to finally be starting to edge past that sub-20 barrier; I am determined to be sub-15 someday.

But unfortunately my improvement on 3x3x3 is slower than on pretty much any other puzzle, so it's slow going.

The good news is that even at 61, I'm still improving. Just got a 19.39 average of 12.

 

[Anon]

I accidentally learned a Ub perm:

M2 U' (M U2 M') U' M2

I looked it up in idle curiosity, and it was so 'Roux' that I learned it without trying. I'm purposefully not going to learn Ua for a while though. The algorithms are so similar that I'll definitely mix them up without strong mental separation.

anyway, my pinkies really hurt from stabilizing the s-slice for my index finger F and F' turns, so I'm going to take a break until my hands recover. (Hopefully only a day or two!)

 

[Anon]

Actually, LOL, I'm averaging a solid 20. But I do seem to finally be starting to edge past that sub-20 barrier; I am determined to be sub-15 someday.

But unfortunately my improvement on 3x3x3 is slower than on pretty much any other puzzle, so it's slow going.

The good news is that even at 61, I'm still improving. Just got a 19.39 average of 12.

Thank you very much for commenting! Your slow (but inexorable?) progress makes me feel much better about my own rate of progress.

 

[Anon]

Hello all!

I hope you've been well. Unfortunately my pinkies are taking a bit to recover. Honestly, I feel like I could power through some practice even right now, but with how long it took me to get to this point from last we spoke (a week to recover!?), I think I should play it conservatively. Again, patience will be the name-of-the-game as I wait for my muscles and tendons to get used to a different work load.

To bide the time until I can practice more seriously again, I've been idly drilling algs while I do other things. Now that I write that, I see it may not have helped my recovery time -_-.

I did also learn a cheeky 6-flip algorithm for the EO step.

R U' r' U' M' U r U r'

I do all the U moves with my left index and I use an interrupted U2' push-through so I don't have to reset my left index finger. I quite enjoy the finger-tricks; they make the algorithm fun to drill.

With regards to the future, after my hands finish healing, I think I need to slay EO. I will drop EOLR dreams, and go through each EO case. Instead of visualizing a "bespoke" solution with a pipes technique, I want to memorize a "default" solution. That way (1) I'll have a point of reference once I'm ready to start learning EOLR (e.g. this case is nice because it uses the "default" solution while that case is naughty because it needs a variant). And (2) I'll be able to default to the "default" solution, which should help my times in the short term. (important for motivation)

 

[Anon]

I just got my first statistically significant improvement!

I was practicing LSE even though I said I wouldn't practice. (I'm apparently a lying addict.) Everything felt better than when I took a break a week ago. So, I grabbed the following stats:

mu = 10.17
sigma = 3.56
n = 12

and compared to the LSE of my 2023-10-01 benchmark

mu = 15.06
sigma = 4.97
n = 15

A (Welch) t-test gives p = 0.0083 versus my standard alpha = 0.05. Statistically Significant!

I'm 95% confident that I've improved this step by 1.37 to 8.40 seconds.

There's probably some stopping bias because I only tested when I felt hot, but I don't care. Improvement is improvement.

 

[Anon]

I've changed the way I practice too. First, I'll solve the scramble blind, and log that time. Then I'll slowly downsolve, thinking about how I could have done it better.

This lead me to an insight about 2-bad-edge cases in EO (which I believe is primarily responsible for my improvement previous post). I've been having a tough time choose which of the 8 elements in the

(M/M') (U/U') (M/M')

family will take me from 2 bad edges to an arrow. I've tried doing a ton of solves and hoping to learn by osmosis. I've tried the pipes visualization technique (didn't seem to be working well), and I was considering just memorizing 6 choose 2 = 15 algorithms for each of the 2-bad-edge cases. That's a ton for me considering I only know 11 (7 from OCLL, Ja perm, Ub perm, Y perm, 6-flip).

Then I just realized I should think about the number of bad edges I bring up with my first (M/M') move. If there's two, I need to make a column with 1 bad edge and bring it up. If there's one, I need to make a column with 2 bad edges and bring it up.

Combined with the parity knowledge I found previously (e.g. all elements starting with M' will swap the orientation of bcdu edges, so they cannot solve, say, cu bad) this let's me fumble a way to an arrow fairly quickly. I need a ton of looks because I have to watch the U and F faces to see what columns I need and which are being formed, but it's good enough for now.

I'm going to keep practicing, and when I feel comfy, I'm going to start trying to track my UL and UR edges as I solve EO. (I should also take another benchmark eventually too, LSE is only one part of the solve.)