A lot of people used SQTM when ranking algs and I'm inclined to believe that this is a good idea.
Possibly. When I did my study comparing 1-look and 2-look OLL, I tried a few different approaches and found the best correlation between metric and execution time by using STM but counting half-turns as 1.5 and rotations as 2 - but that's just me and it might not work for others' turning styles. Also, I was measuring widely-used OLL algs, and the correlation still varied according to the flow of the algs; when applied to Cube Explorer optimum solutions with less consistent finger-tricks and without down-selection to choose the better solutions, I would speculate that the correlation would be much weaker.
Secondly, execution time for an intuitive step like pairs or blocks depends as much (often more) on recognising patterns and figuring out moves than it does on actual move execution speed, and so move efficiency is only one indicator of the method's potential.
Thus I didn't make any claims about execution times, and focused only on move efficiency for the analysis in the OP (albeit with not the best choice of metric).
CFOP is not efficient a lot, but there's easier recognition => more things you can focus on => better fluidity I guess...
Indeed. What prompted me to start this thread was the observation that actually the potential move efficiency of CFOP was more limited, and much weaker compared to blockbuilding, than I had realized before. So today we have two common approaches:-
- CFOP pairs: More formulaic and simpler to master due to focus on fewer pieces at a time. Thus easier to achieve fast, smooth TPS and lookahead. However, maximum efficiency is almost half that of blockbuilding when focusing on one slot at a time. And, typical execution efficiency is already close to that maximum, so it doesn't allow much room for improvement. The usual approach to focusing on more than one slot (multislotting) does not improve maximum efficiency by much. (TL;DR version: CFOP has already reached its efficiency limit so it's all down to TPS.)
- Blockbuilding: More free-form and difficult to master. However, optimum efficiency is much better than CFOP. Typical execution efficiency is poor compared to optimum efficiency, but that presents much better potential for improvement, even if that improvement is difficult.
What I'm interested in is whether there could be a hybrid between these approaches that retains some of the simple formulaic approach of CFOP but improving the efficiency towards that of blockbuilding. I'm not convinced multislotting is the way forward (sorry about the misleading thread title). Perhaps taking blockbuilding and creating some simple patterns to make it more formulaic is the way to go. (I'd be surprised if that formalisation hadn't been attempted already, given that most people probably block build that way anyway.)
Even if it's impossible or unrealistic, it seems like a relatively under-explored aspect of speedcubing, by contrast with the plethora of LL/LS submethods.