• Welcome to the Speedsolving.com, home of the web's largest puzzle community!
    You are currently viewing our forum as a guest which gives you limited access to join discussions and access our other features.

    Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community of 40,000+ people from around the world today!

    If you are already a member, simply login to hide this message and begin participating in the community!

Acquiring a Letter System: part 2, Learning - How did you learn yours?

leeo

Member
Joined
Oct 6, 2014
Messages
75
Location
Spokane, WA
WCA
2016ODEG01
I discovered
_How to Memorize for Blind Solving_ by stevenarducci. I figured the lettering system presented there was just as good as any, so I went about "relearning the alphabet" as it applies to edge stickers. I applied the system to the corner stickers also. I find more consistencies with stevenarducci's system than speffz, but that is as far as I will go for selling that system. I want to focus on acquisition.

I'm a machine operator for my day job, and thus I have 90-second increments where all I have to do is monitor the machine process for crashes. This allows me many 90 second mental practice time sessions throughout the day. I started with a random letter list, and began to trace the letter through the alphabet "U face A B C D -- L face E F G H -- F face I J K ....". The sequence AEIMQU, the lead letter cubie for each plane is helpful. Now "R" -- B face Q R speeds up the count.

The next breakthrough was to pick up the names of the three facelets on each of the eight corner cubies in the same order (clockwise for speffz). I came up with a mnemonic for each of the names. Today being Halloween, I cannot resist the following mnemonics based on the costumes of children knocking tonight on my front door for "Trick or Treat":

AER - arrow through the head cap
BQN - bee queen (my granddaughter's actual costume)
CMJ - captain magic (magician's costume)
DIF - different (some other wild costume)

GLU - glue (the KRA-GL in the Lego Movie)
HXS - hexes (witches costume)
KPV - captive (old-fashioned striped prisoner's shirt)
OTW - out of this world (space alien costume)

It was a short time from mastering those eight names to the point where a letter instantly brings to mind a particular cubie position. It is so much more efficient to work in a letter system than in three-point Singmaster - I feel it is the key to navigating a BLD solve. In fact, I came up with a long name for each corner cubie based on these eight keys, with the lead letter in front if it is not one of the eight of ABCDGHKO .

E-AER - "E-arrow"
F-DIF - "F-differ"
I-DIF
J-CMJ - "J-Captain Magic"
L-GLU
M-CMJ
N-BQN
P-KPV

and so forth.
 
Last edited:
Top