I certainly agree with Dene on this as well. Though I do feel that until somebody gets a solid cross, cross to f2l transition, look ahead through all pairs, and a last layer in sub4.5 (including recognition for both OLL/PLL) that there are probably more important matters to work on. Although, being CN early will benefit you so you don't take a huge F2L time hit, but my argument to that is just learn one color at a time then its opposite. It should be much easier learning blue/green than blue/red.
But discussing the advantages of CN (and respectively its disadvantages) could certainly help people out, and it might open some people's eyes (to either go for it or stop learning it).
Alright so I've been working on the whole CN thing and this is what I got
Orange Cross: 40.86 (first day, it was pretty rough)
Blue Cross: 34.19 (I was happy with the drop in time, started to recognize patterns instead of looking for colors)
Red Cross: 32.24
White Cross: 27.90 (Pretty bad for white cross but I'd been doing odd cross colors so I took it)
Green Cross: 33.70 (Although the time went up my standard deviation for the compared to my other non-white crosses was lower so I was happy with that. I figured consistent is better than speed)
Yellow Cross: would have been ~29 (I didn't actually finish the average, I got 40 in but was so fried from doing 500 solves in 5 days I just couldn't finish)
Color Neutral Cross: 31.42
number of times: 100/100
best time: 21.02
worst time: 56.24
My white solves kept this lower than it really should have been. I chose which cross I did based on the number of oriented edges on the face. So two oriented green edges and no oriented edges on the other faces = green cross.
I'm by no means CN yet but I think I'll cut back to daily Ao50's and then do 50 CN solves. Any advice from here other than practice?
I'm also considering switching back to black cubes instead of white. Is there really a difference in recognition or is that one of those debated things that can't be proved?
I chose which cross I did based on the number of oriented edges on the face. So two oriented green edges and no oriented edges on the other faces = green cross.
Just because more edges are oriented on a given face, doesn't mean it's a better cross, look for if you can orient them easily as well, if an edge is one turn from being on it's corresponding cross, or something of that nature.
just fyi, its not possible to be CN on a square-1 because each side is unique and different from every other side and therefore must have a certain color every time
Yea I figured out the Square-1 thing. For edges if there is an obvious edge that can be oriented with one move then I count that towards it's respective cross.
I dunno if this will help out or not, but I personally (as an intermediary step to full color neutral) decided to be 'half' color neutral wherein I only solve crosses on white, blue, and red. I'm still improving (average ~18 seconds) my speed in general, but I only really needed a lil more than a month to have my times on blue and red be comparable to white. Because of the 'ease' in which one can learn opposite cross, I presume this will allow for an easier transition to full color neutral.
Probably self explanatory but I just wanted to get the word out there in case it hasn't been mentioned.
P.S. my decision to go half color neutral actually helped me achieve my first sub 20 average of 5...or how should I say, I almost got the feeling that I was solving a 'different' cube when I was solving on a different color (like a new toy) so it reinvigorated me into practicing more again when I felt I was plateau-ing at around 22 seconds.
That makes a lot of sense and wouldn't be as overwhelming. Do you think I should do blue red white and yellow since I'm already pretty good with yellow? Then once I'm comfortable with those I can add in orange and green.
haha, yea, I'm sure that's fine, whatever you're comfortable with; the more crosses you can see the better chance you'll have an easy cross.
But I personally worked on the colors one by one when I practiced. After beign stuck at 21-23 seconds average for awhile, I decided to give blue cross a go just for the heck of it (I was almost giving up hope about ever being sub-20) and I forced myself to do mostly blues crosses (prolly 80% of my solves for 1.5-2 weeks were on blue cross, I would only solve it on white if it was extremely easy). After about 2 weeks of blue I went on to red and did almost exclusively red and blue solves for a few weeks.
I'll have to admit, even though I can solve comparable times on white, red, and blue (my pb 12.78 and it was on red, but it was a pll skip) I ~feel~ like my look ahead is ever-so-slightly better on white because that's the color that I used for a long time. But I'm still riding my current wave of improvement so hopefully that feeling will fade soon.
So you recommend doing dedicated blue cross or whichever color for a little and then switching to a new color and doing that for a while over a different cross each day?
It's just a suggestion, that's how I went about it, but I don't claim to be an expert by any means. As far as I know, most people just seem to dive straight into it or stick with opposite color neutral.
I guess I didn't mention that before doing strictly blue solves, I did try full color neutral (as I said, I felt like I wasn't improving so I was just playing around and decided to try color neutral) for like a day. But it was a bit too much and my times were really bad since I had to do a different cross each time and I still wasn't comfortable with the color scheme for each cross. As I was doing my play around color neutral solves, however, I started to feel very 'attracted', for the lack of a better term, to the blue cross so I decided I'd just do that instead. And yea eventually I did the same for red (incidentally red and blue are my favorite colors) I now actually like to solve on red and blue more than white, but I still go for whichever has the easiest cross...white just feels boring
anyway enough about how I'm going about it...just do what feels natural to you, if you think you can do 4 colors comparably then by all means go for it
i dont think that theres much need to convert into being cn, you have to be cn from the start. ive been cn from the time i learned how to solve the cube and i always hear people say its so difficult to trasition but i never really got why. buti think its just how everyones brain wroks differently, if its hard to do it there not really a need to do it, your either cn or not.
I'm glad you thought this was an appropriate place to put in your two cents but transitioning from white cross (or any other cross) to CN is just about identifying patterns instead of sticker colors. It's not a difficult transition if you realize that sooner rather than later.
It still takes time to re-learn it. It's like learning a new method. Slow at first but with perserverance it gets better. And it does help with look ahead. Staring at my cube for three seconds trying to find a corner or edge is obnoxious so I focus on looking ahead more.
Edit: I just read through the thread and realized that this CN Ao100 was just .03 seconds slower than my last white cross Ao100. That's amazing, it hasn't even been two weeks.
I was pretty happy with the results. There was a lot more consistency than previously and a lot of low-20s that weren't white crosses. There were still some pretty rough times where the RAo5 and RAo12 were pretty high so I think I'll join the Race to sub-30 Thread to motivate myself to improve consistency.
I'm going to do another Ao100 this weekend and if it's ~26.5- then I'm saying I'm CN
I discovered something interesting today related to color-neutrality. Yesterday I was bored and switched my LingYun to Japanese color scheme. Today I tried solving it with blue cross and averaged about 22 seconds: slower than yellow cross on BOY color scheme but about the same as other color crosses on BOY.
I thought this was kind of weird. People that are color-neutral, are you also color-scheme neutral?
Also, even though my main cross color is yellow, I seem to be better at blue cross than white. This is also strange since I don't know the order of colors around the blue face (which may be why it's just as fast on Japanese color scheme).
I discovered something interesting today related to color-neutrality. Yesterday I was bored and switched my LingYun to Japanese color scheme. Today I tried solving it with blue cross and averaged about 22 seconds: slower than yellow cross on BOY color scheme but about the same as other color crosses on BOY.
I thought this was kind of weird. People that are color-neutral, are you also color-scheme neutral?
Also, even though my main cross color is yellow, I seem to be better at blue cross than white. This is also strange since I don't know the order of colors around the blue face (which may be why it's just as fast on Japanese color scheme).
Imho the process in learning a new scheme is essentially the same as learning to be color neutral (or learning to solve on another non-opposite color). At least that's how it feels to me (CFLOP method).
