FMC solution system

[bcube]

Hi,

1) what is the reason for WCA to not publish FMC solutions?

2) how does the WCA prevent this hypothetical cheating situation? The competitor has found a 30-move solution, the official responsible for entering results (or the WCA database administrator) has entered a number 25 instead of 30 (which would become obvious if the solution was made public).

 

[tseitsei]

1) Less work really. Delegates are volunteers, comp organizers are volunteers, literally everything is done by volunteers. So stacking more work than absolutely necessary on them is definitely not good. Imagine a comp with 50 or 100 competitors. Manually entering all those 150-300 FMC solutions to computer takes a lot of work for 1 or few delegates. And is bound to have several typing errors anyway.

2) The whole system already heavily relies on the fact that we trust delegates to be fair and not cheat. Cheating as a delegate would be insanely easy if they wanted to cheat anyway.

Now in a perfect world we would obviously have paid staff and judges and proper resources to handle everything professionally but as it stands currently, cubing is still very niche hobby with extremely little money on the table and thus relies heavily on volunteers to get comps organized in the first place.

 

[xyzzy]

Manually entering all those 150-300 FMC solutions to computer takes a lot of work for 1 or few delegates. And is bound to have several typing errors anyway.

I think this is actually more feasible than you make it sound.

Delegates already have to go through all the moves, and for anyone who can touch type, it's not that much slower to type out the moves as compared to doing them on a physical cube. (And you could imagine some kind of stenographic system to input the moves even faster?)

With a computerised system, you could even automatically check for typos. If the entered solution is a DNF, but it's off by 4c4e, the computer could check if it's off by one move somewhere (e.g. omitted move or duplicated move) and highlight the location of the error; the grader can then verify against the submitted answer sheet whether it was the grader's typo or the competitor's mistake. (Doesn't have to specifically be 4c4e; it could also check for move transpositions (4c3e/5c3e/6c3e) and such.)

 

[tseitsei]

I think this is actually more feasible than you make it sound.

Delegates already have to go through all the moves, and for anyone who can touch type, it's not that much slower to type out the moves as compared to doing them on a physical cube. (And you could imagine some kind of stenographic system to input the moves even faster?)

With a computerised system, you could even automatically check for typos. If the entered solution is a DNF, but it's off by 4c4e, the computer could check if it's off by one move somewhere (e.g. omitted move or duplicated move) and highlight the location of the error; the grader can then verify against the submitted answer sheet whether it was the grader's typo or the competitor's mistake. (Doesn't have to specifically be 4c4e; it could also check for move transpositions (4c3e/5c3e/6c3e) and such.)

Definitely not saying that it isn't feasible. Just that it would need resources.

I would think most cubers (me definitely included) can do moves on a cube from notation MUCH faster than type them on a computer. And delegate can use other people on the venue to check solutions since pretty much everyone know the notation. But inputting official results to wca is (to my understanding) something that only delegates can/are allowed to do.

Also more importantly we circle back to resources. It would ofcourse be possible to make such a system that inputting solutions is fast and easy. BUT we currently don't have such a system and developing such system takes resources. And as said before resources are limited. Current system seems to be working "well enough" so using a lot of those limited resources to fix something that isn't critical is maybe not the best idea.

Don't get me wrong it would be nice to have all official solutions on WCA page availible to everybody. And it would be nice to have a system like a smartcube where you only need to do the moves from solution sheet and it automatically enters it to the WCA database. But is it worth the effort?

 

[Mike Hughey]

I suspect the kinds of people who typically enter results for the normal timed events would be as fast or faster at typing in solutions than most good cubers are at execution of the solutions. Remember, typists are fast! And having it auto-check the solution would be really nice. It would require some additional software (especially to look for anomalies like xyzzy suggests), but our community has some of the best software developers out there. I really like the idea of entering solutions into the database going forward, if and when we have the software for it.

 

[Pyjam]

It should be possible to simply take a picture of the solution, and appropriate software will convert it into text.