Blindsolving Failure Thread

Well.

3BLD DNF; it was a very nice scramble (1 cycle for edges, 2 pieces solved) and I was very confident the whole way through (sub 2 minute memo - fast as hell for me!) until I found my buffer spot in my edge memo. Ugh.

Corners were off by 2 twisted pieces but whatever
 
Today I tried my first multibld: 1/2, two edges flipped :( (memo 8:20, total time 12:52.47)
anyway, it's a bittersweet result, because I did my first succesful blind solve about 3 weeks ago (after 1 weeks of DNFs). I have great expectations for blindcubing future :)
 
Tried 7bld, gave up 35 minutes into memo. Centers are frustrating; I was often finding that I'd memorize the wrong letter, or the same letter twice. Obliques were annoying. One orbit was easy to memo, because it's the same standard as everything else, but the other orbit is mirrored from that so I can't just think of a letter and immediately go to that piece yet, and vice versa.

I'm not going to any more attempts for a while, instead I'll just practice everything separately.
 
4BLD DNF by 12 centres =/
I ALWAYS get the centres wrong! They seemed fairly easy in this scramble, quite a few solved and no new cycles and I executed pretty safely as well..dunno what happened :( Only thing I can think of is visualising the wrong pieces while performing comms.

I want success :( :(
 
amostay2004 said:
4BLD DNF by 12 centres =/
I ALWAYS get the centres wrong! They seemed fairly easy in this scramble, quite a few solved and no new cycles and I executed pretty safely as well..dunno what happened :( Only thing I can think of is visualising the wrong pieces while performing comms.

I want success :( :(
Click to expand...

Practice centers by solving centers 2 at a time - find the next two, close your eyes and solve them, then open your eyes and make sure they're solved. If not, figure out why. It's also possible you might be messing up other centers inadvertently, so if you're willing to work a little harder, first write down the whole solution, then check after each pair to make sure you did them right without messing up any of the others. Inadvertently messing up the other centers might be your problem, so it might be worth it to do that.

I remember back when I was first working on big cubes BLD, I failed my first two attempts at 5x5x5 BLD and then spent about 3 weeks just doing this sort of thing, and then tried again and got my first success.
 
amostay2004 said:
4BLD DNF by 12 centres =/
I ALWAYS get the centres wrong! They seemed fairly easy in this scramble, quite a few solved and no new cycles and I executed pretty safely as well..dunno what happened :( Only thing I can think of is visualising the wrong pieces while performing comms.

I want success :( :(
Click to expand...

This may be a stupid question, and forgive me if it is, but do you solve corners before you solve centers? If so, make sure you're using supercube safe corner algs. Otherwise it will destroy the center state that you memorized.

Chris
 
cmhardw said:
This may be a stupid question, and forgive me if it is, but do you solve corners before you solve centers? If so, make sure you're using supercube safe corner algs. Otherwise it will destroy the center state that you memorized.

Chris
Click to expand...

Yeah I use BH and some freestyle-ish algs for corners so they're centres-safe. Though I was actually off by 6 centres, not 12 (long story to explain why I said 12 at first :P) and going through my centres memo I realise I may have forgot to memo a piece or 2..so I got pretty close! :D Will do more attempts tomorrow :)
 
double posts ftw

Big cube BLD DNF streaks are totally awesome! :fp

At least I am getting material to work on with my post mortems though. That does lead me to a question though, Mike how do you post mortem centers? Because of Michael's point that the centers are indistinct, then there are always multiple errors that would give the appearance of any specific DNF state. What general process do you go about to discover the nature of a centers DNF? I have found that if the DNF locations contain one of my images intact, and the first letter location after this image contains the color of the first letter of the intact image, then I did not execute that image during the solve. Other than that, though, I have a hard time figuring out what I did wrong on my center cycles to achieve the DNF state that I end up with. Any recommendations?
 
cmhardw said:
double posts ftw

Big cube BLD DNF streaks are totally awesome! :fp

At least I am getting material to work on with my post mortems though. That does lead me to a question though, Mike how do you post mortem centers? Because of Michael's point that the centers are indistinct, then there are always multiple errors that would give the appearance of any specific DNF state. What general process do you go about to discover the nature of a centers DNF? I have found that if the DNF locations contain one of my images intact, and the first letter location after this image contains the color of the first letter of the intact image, then I did not execute that image during the solve. Other than that, though, I have a hard time figuring out what I did wrong on my center cycles to achieve the DNF state that I end up with. Any recommendations?
Click to expand...

i know nothing about big cube bld..but you could video tape your solve, that might possibly help
 
The way I do them isn't real fancy - nothing as elaborate as what you've been doing for non-centers. I try to actually remember my mistakes - often I can. I will first look at where the pieces are that are wrong, and then go through my memorization looking for those pieces. If I find them in the memo, many times I can immediately remember where my mistake was (oh, that's right - I went this way instead of that way on that commutator - how stupid!). Or I will often find one of the pieces in the memo twice - then it's obvious what went wrong. If I see the mistake at this level, it's usually not that hard to work out where all the pieces would have went based on my mistake, so I can check and make sure it accounts for everything. I would guess I figure it out that way over 50% of the time.

When that doesn't work, then I reapply the scramble, and check the memo. If it's wrong, problem solved; if it's right, then I will often just start solving that orbit of pieces, trying to remember as I go exactly how I did them during the original solve, and check after each pair of pieces. I almost always figure it out that way, if it comes to that.

I admit that if I ever have more than about 5 pieces of a given orbit wrong, I almost always just give up and don't bother.
 
Mike Hughey said:
The way I do them isn't real fancy - nothing as elaborate as what you've been doing for non-centers. I try to actually remember my mistakes - often I can. I will first look at where the pieces are that are wrong, and then go through my memorization looking for those pieces. If I find them in the memo, many times I can immediately remember where my mistake was (oh, that's right - I went this way instead of that way on that commutator - how stupid!). Or I will often find one of the pieces in the memo twice - then it's obvious what went wrong. If I see the mistake at this level, it's usually not that hard to work out where all the pieces would have went based on my mistake, so I can check and make sure it accounts for everything. I would guess I figure it out that way over 50% of the time.
Click to expand...

I do something similar here, except that I write down my [(DNF)]' (as Michael pointed out, this is only one of many possible [(DNF)]'s for that scramble though) and also my memorization. That makes it easy to spot shooting to a piece twice. I try to notice if the [(DNF)]' includes whole image pairs, or something like the end of one pair and the start of another. It sounds like we're pretty much doing the exact same thing here though.

When that doesn't work, then I reapply the scramble, and check the memo. If it's wrong, problem solved; if it's right, then I will often just start solving that orbit of pieces, trying to remember as I go exactly how I did them during the original solve, and check after each pair of pieces. I almost always figure it out that way, if it comes to that.
Click to expand...

Bolded part: Do you consider the possibility that you scrambled incorrectly before doing the actual blindfolded solve? Or do you scramble very carefully such as to avoid this possibility?

The whole comment: I think I may have to try that. I don't think I've actually stepped through the centers solve like this before. I can see there being some lingering muscle memory of what you actually executed, such that a red flag would go up when/if that doesn't match the memorization.

I admit that if I ever have more than about 5 pieces of a given orbit wrong, I almost always just give up and don't bother.
Click to expand...

These tend to be the kinds of DNFs I get, though :( I will have wings and corners solved perfectly, but have over 5-6 centers unsolved. Keep in mind that my solving order as soon as I put on the blindfold is: corners -> centers -> wings. So this would mean that corners were done correctly such as to leave the centers in the same state that they were at the scramble. I considered the possibility that one of my algs is not actually being supercube safe, and is rotating some centers, but I use strictly BH. Because of it's conjugate and commutator nature everything there is supercube safe. I don't fix corner parity until after centers are solved, so that is not the cause of any possible center rotation. So my corners step, it seems, is not affecting or rotating any center groups.

Next I solve centers somehow incorrectly, but leaving the wings unaffected. I know this because wings will be solved perfectly at the end. So I am not making setup and setdown errors, or the wings would be unsolved as well.

The only other conclusion I can come to is transposing of my R face lettering to my old scheme without realizing it. I have on occasion caught myself doing this on a solve before starting the commutator (or sometimes halfway through). In these cases I correct, but perhaps I don't always catch it? If I shot to the R face incorrectly once or twice I suppose this could account for 3-5 unsolved pieces. I find it hard to believe that I would shoot incorrectly to the R face all 3 or 4 times that the solve would require, but perhaps I do sometimes?

At Michael's suggestion I may try to fix up a much better quality 4x4x4 supercube than my current eastsheen cube and do solves on it like a regular 4x4x4. This way I could at least compare a DNF state to the original scramble using my [(DNF)]' and [X] techniques the same way. I wouldn't do this all the time, but at least until I got the same kind of bad centers DNF and could figure out the problem.

RyanReese09 said:
i know nothing about big cube bld..but you could video tape your solve, that might possibly help
Click to expand...

Ryan I may actually try this as well. I don't have a video camera, just a webcam. I will see what kind of frame-rate it gets, and see if this might be possible. Thanks for the suggestion, as that could certainly pick up any error quite easily!

Chris
 
cmhardw said:
Bolded part: Do you consider the possibility that you scrambled incorrectly before doing the actual blindfolded solve? Or do you scramble very carefully such as to avoid this possibility?
Click to expand...

Occasionally I mis-scramble, but when I do, it's hopelessly wrong, so I can tell that right away. When that happens, I give up. But fortunately it doesn't happen very often - I'm pretty accurate at scrambling. I think it's pretty safe to say I don't have problems where a few pieces are wrong because of mis-scrambling; if I mess up the scramble, it's really bad.
 
MBLD at Dutch Nats: 3/7 in 57.19.
This was my first attempt ever at more than 5 cubes. One cube was solved up to the last setup I undid wrong, one had 4 edges flipped, the last two had more pieces unsolved but at least there was no completely scrambled cube.
I iddn't really expect to get a 7/7, but at least I know it should be possible for me soon.
 
5bld: DNF 9:32.19

4:04 memo, using my new ultra-mega-super-special-secret memo method.

U corners were off by a U2 so I must have forgotten to undo a setup somewhere, plus a bunch of wings+edges+centers that would result from that too.
 
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