BLD Epiphany

Sir E Brum

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Sep 24, 2008
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414
Location
San Antonio, TX
WCA ID
2010HANN01
I have been practicing BLD edges (3OP). During my third look at the edge order for a solve an image of a cube pops into my head. It has the orientation that I use to solve for BLD (yellow top, blue front). Neon strands appear connecting each pair of edges that are part of the edge cycle.
The strand connecting the first and second edges was yellow.
The strand connecting the third and fourth edges was pink.
The strand connecting the fifth and sixth edges was purple.
The strand connecting the seventh and eighth edges was green.
The strand connecting the ninth and tenth edges was red.

I just solved it by moving from one strand to the next. When I took the blindfold off it was solved :)
Even 25 minutes after the solve I can vividly see the same cube with the neon strands in the same positions. The strands go through the cube and connect the pieces together. I can even rotate the cube in my head and the strands remain firmly in place.

I didn't choose any of the colors or even contemplate the idea before trying to use it. It just happened. Has anyone had an experience similar to this?
 
I didn't choose any of the colors or even contemplate the idea before trying to use it. It just happened. Has anyone had an experience similar to this?

Yes, when I first started 3BLD. Letter pairs eventually became waaayy faster once I got my system down.
 
I used to do this for corners, but I later found images more effective for me. The only difference is I used something similar to elastic bands, and I could manipulate them around and place them down with pins. I used OP when doing that.

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I think a big problem with this method is that it will be difficult to repeat in sessions quickly. Letter pairs made the memorization disticnt enough to not worry about similarities. This may not matter for you now, but visual stuff like this would get difficult if you plan to do long sessions with >30 solves.
 
I think a big problem with this method is that it will be difficult to repeat in sessions quickly. Letter pairs made the memorization disticnt enough to not worry about similarities. This may not matter for you now, but visual stuff like this would get difficult if you plan to do long sessions with >30 solves.

Imagine multi.
 
People probably shouldn't be so hard on this. Back when we first started breaking the minute barrier, most of the people doing it were using methods somewhat similar to this. I was doing something similar as well, but unfortunately I was around 2 minutes at the time.

Since then we've discovered that mnemonic methods definitely don't slow you down relative to visual, but a few years ago visual methods seemed the best possible approach!
 
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People probably shouldn't be so hard on this. Back when we first started breaking the minute barrier, most of the people doing it were using methods somewhat similar to this. I was doing something similar as well, but unfortunately I was around 2 minutes at the time.

Since then we've discovered that mnemonic methods definitely don't slow you down relative to visual, but a few years ago visual methods seemed the best possible approach!

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject. Back when I actually practiced BLD, I was getting sub60 solves using purely visual memory methods. Visual isn't as terrible as a memory method as you might expect. It just has much harsher limits than common memory methods today.
 
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