A few Noob questions

[minsarker]

Hey, I have a few questions that are basically clarification:

1. What does number of moves mean? Does it mean like number of algorithmic moves or number of turns? AKA is F2 L2 U2 D one move or 7 moves or 4 moves?

2. What is meant by turns per second? AKA is F2 L2 U2 D 7 turns or 4 turns?

3. Are moves and turns the same thing?

4. On cubemania, the scrambles they give you, are they all random and equally challenging or are there difficulties somehow?

Thanks for looking and please help!

 

[*LukeMayn*]

1. F2 L2 U2 D is 4 moves, or 1 algorithm (a series of moves)

2. how many times you can turn in 1 second. like R U R' U' is 4 moves/turns and if each turn took .25 secs then I am doing 4TPS (turns per second)

3. yes

4. they vary, just like any other scramble anywhere.

 

[minsarker]

whats a good turn per second time?

my solves take about 100ish moves at this point, and im at around 1:20 average, so like 1.25 moves per second

thanks for answering the questions by the way!

 

[Sin-H]

Well, there are guys out there whom it takes about 50 moves and they can do that in 11 seconds, so it's ~4.5tps.

It's normal to have like 5tps for a really really good cuber.


But some algorithms, like only R U' R' U can be done in more than 14tps.

Anyway, tps are only really important when it comes to Sub15 or even lower.

Lookahead is more important at first.


Happy Cubing
Stefan

 

[minsarker]

ahh I see, im also doing a simple corner first method at the moment and not really learning algorithms for specific cases, just one or two per step

im getting much better at look ahead by going slow once then fast then slow then fast

 

[brunson]

There are different ways to count turns. People used to always use quarter turns as the metric (qtm), so your example would be 7 qtm. If you ever read an article that purports that the cube can be solved in 40ish moves, they're probably talking qtm. Now a days most people refer to half turn metrics, so LukeMayne's answer is correct in that respect.

Some discussions of algorithm optimizations benefit by being in qtm. Also, some methods like Roux make such heavy use of slice moves that optimizations in those are discussed in "slice turn metrics", since a slice move in htm would be two face turns. For the most part unless someone specifies the metric, you can assume htm.