color neutral cubers

[Dene]

Oh dear I'm sorry Lars! I didn't mean to make it sound like I was arguing. I was merely trying to help. I just think you are going about becoming colour neutral completely the wrong way if you force yourself to use other colours, even if they are not convenient at the start.
I think colour neutrality is something that you have to let come naturally. You just have to do solves on whichever cross looks nice and the rest will follow. However it might be a good idea to ignore the colour that you are used to solving on. But don't ignore it entirely, lest you become "5-colour neutral" .

[About] How long does it take you to identify which color you'll be solving the cross on during inspection, and do you still have time to plan your cross once you've decided?

Seeing as you're being impatient I'll answer: not very long. The two cues that I use to decide my cross are: 1. The centre with the most connecting edges; and 2. The centre with the most opposite edges (i.e. F2 to place edge).
These two cues stand out the most I think. In cases of conflicting possible crosses it takes longer to pick. In this case you need to decide which will be the better between the two. Usually there is an obvious one to eliminate, like with a flipped edge or something in an awkward place. If this happens it takes longer to decide on the colour, but when you have you already know the cross.

I just did a quick experiment, and it seems that it takes me about 7-8 seconds to plan the cross. The time it took to decide on which colour cross varied a lot more.

 

[guitardude7241]

[About] How long does it take you to identify which color you'll be solving the cross on during inspection, and do you still have time to plan your cross once you've decided?

me?
5 or 6 secs, then a few more to plan that cross out, if some of it's already not done.

 

[eastamazonantidote]

I've had fun times solving on red and orange. Note that time there doesn't refer to good solving times, but minutes of entertainment.

I am completely color neutral on any even-numbered cube (even teh legendary 0x0x0). I just start where the cube left off.

I've worked on becoming partially CN (W/Y like everyone in the world) on the 3x3x3 and odd-numbered cubes in general (don't know why. psychological?). I also have green down alright and blue is coming along. I feel that once I get that third option down comfortably, the others will just fall into place.

I'm working on it, and this thread has gotten me more motivated. Though ZBLL also takes up a lot of time...CNZB sounds like a news channel.

 

[Faz]

[About] How long does it take you to identify which color you'll be solving the cross on during inspection, and do you still have time to plan your cross once you've decided?

Few seconds at the most. I look for edges.

 

[guitardude7241]

[About] How long does it take you to identify which color you'll be solving the cross on during inspection, and do you still have time to plan your cross once you've decided?

Few seconds at the most. I look for edges.

lolz thats what 4/5 of the cross composes of

 

[DavidWoner]

Any CN Roux users out there? Whenever I use Roux for fun, I find it a bit hard to start on any colour. I wouldn't really say I'm CN with Roux.

Thom always has white/yellow on L/R. This way he can easily place L/R edges during l6e, even if he is using non matching blocks. Austin always has red on bottom, I'm not sure if he has fixed L/R colors though.

 

[jazzthief81]

Lars vs Dene:

Dene is right about cross. Forcing yourself to use a certain cross color misses the point of CN.

So Lars is right about the cross too. I never said anything that contradicted this.

Also, remember this? http://www.cubezone.be/crossstudy.html Do you think I went through all that effort without knowing what I was doing?

I repeat: the color neutral average was just a fun idea. Of course I know that you're restricting your choice.

So what? I don't care!

 

[jazzthief81]

I just think you are going about becoming colour neutral completely the wrong way if you force yourself to use other colours, even if they are not convenient at the start.

I never said that I would do that. I only mentioned this in reply to someones remark on my fun idea to record a video where I would do 2 solves on each color. I never claimed that being able to do that is the point of being color neutral.

However, I think it's still is a good measure of your color neutrality and... it's a fun idea.

However it might be a good idea to ignore the colour that you are used to solving on..

...and forcing myself not to use a particular color? Are you joking? :confused:

 

[nathanajah]

Ando (Heribertus Ariando) and Jihan Khalillurahman are color neutral.
I think both of them are sub-15.

 

[Dene]

However it might be a good idea to ignore the colour that you are used to solving on..

...and forcing myself not to use a particular color? Are you joking? :confused:

Just temporarily. Just to try to wash down the influence that white might have on your solving. It might be best to give it a short break so that the other colours have time to catch up.

 

[brunson]

[About] How long does it take you to identify which color you'll be solving the cross on during inspection, and do you still have time to plan your cross once you've decided?

Two or three seconds, then I commit and don't look back.

 

[miniGOINGS]

Any CN Roux users out there? Whenever I use Roux for fun, I find it a bit hard to start on any colour. I wouldn't really say I'm CN with Roux.

Thom always has white/yellow on L/R. This way he can easily place L/R edges during l6e, even if he is using non matching blocks. Austin always has red on bottom, I'm not sure if he has fixed L/R colors though.

I don't think I know anyone that is fully neutral speedsolving Roux, but I know Waffle is partially (I think he uses black or yellow on U, other than that, neutral). That gives his consistant recog for CMLL and EO.

 

[Kirjava]

Any CN Roux users out there? Whenever I use Roux for fun, I find it a bit hard to start on any colour. I wouldn't really say I'm CN with Roux.

Thom always has white/yellow on L/R. This way he can easily place L/R edges during l6e, even if he is using non matching blocks. Austin always has red on bottom, I'm not sure if he has fixed L/R colors though.

This is true, but to clarify; I'm neutral with regard to opposite colours - that is, L can be white/yellow, and U can be blue/green (sometimes both ).

This gives me four blocks to pick from when I start, and after the first block, I can choose between another two to build as the second.

So it's like half neutral with some additional deep magic - I've never come across someone who is CN with Roux, at least not fully.

 

[CharlieCooper]

I just did an average of 12 using colour neutrality (petrus) and had 17.82s
This is a fairly normal average for me, it's the result I'd expect.

I then did 12 solves making my first 2x2x2 block always red, blue and white for which I had an average of 21.45
This is considerably slower. Without being able to take advantage of easy blocks, it's impossible to build efficiently and quickly. For me at least!

The next thing I tried was always ensuring I finished with a yellow top, i.e. starting with the 2x2x2 RBW block, but extending in such ways that I would be able to have a yellow top and averaged 19.32
I used to do this when I was learning trickier F2L cases for the "last pair" as fridrich users would call it, and I found that it was a lot easier to spot the cases when I was always looking for the same colour patterns.

So that pretty much illustrated my point well. Complete colour neutrality, even with the more difficult last pair situation, is by far the quickest for me. The time it takes me to build difficult blocks but always on the same colour wastes a lot of time for me. This combined with a random last pair colour pattern to recognise makes it pretty difficult to sub 20. Even when I limit but don't completely restrict my colour choice, i.e. in the third average, and even with the benefit of the last layer always being the same colour, it's still barely sub 20. It would appear that a fast initial block, at least in my case, is absolutely imperative to a good solve, even if that means wasting maybe a second (sometimes two) identifying the final pair case.

I would be interested to see how other sub 20 petrus users did with this task.

 

[joey]

Are harder blocks harder to build than hard crosses are hard to build?
(I think so)

 

[rcnrcn927]

I'm color neutral, only because it helps my cross more than it hurts my F2L. I average ~24 seconds. It's easy if you from the start of your cubing career you do the cross on the easiest side, but if you're only accustomed to White, you have to learn to like the other sides.

 

[Muesli]

My thoughts on the matter, or me yapping on and on for 7:33 depending on how you see it.

 

[jazzthief81]

Are harder blocks harder to build than hard crosses are hard to build?
(I think so)

It's kind of hard to tell. If you look at move count, building a 2x2x2 block on a fixed corner takes 6.03 moves on average with a maximum of 8 moves. For building a cross on a fixed side the average is 5.82 with a maximum of 8 moves.

We know that for a color neutral cross the average drops to 4.81 moves but the worst case is still 8 moves.

Stefan Pochmann did some some computer studies in his thesis where he did 10000 random solves with different F2L strategies and he worked out that building a 2x2x2 block on any corner requires about 5.27 moves on average and the worst case he encountered was 7 moves.

Here's a link to Stefan's thesis:
http://www.stefan-pochmann.de/hume/

A recommended read if you want to get a good comparison between block building and cross+pair building!

 

[BigGreen]

Any CN Roux users out there? Whenever I use Roux for fun, I find it a bit hard to start on any colour. I wouldn't really say I'm CN with Roux.

Thom always has white/yellow on L/R. This way he can easily place L/R edges during l6e, even if he is using non matching blocks. Austin always has red on bottom, I'm not sure if he has fixed L/R colors though.

L/R blocks are yellow or white for me
Ive tried different bottom colors before but i never stick with it

also CN + roux would be pretty incredible to see

 

[ElderKingpin]

My thoughts on the matter, or me yapping on and on for 7:33 depending on how you see it.

British accent. Ftw.

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I am semi-color neutral, i can only solve yellow and white cross without going slower. I never thought i would need to be color neutral.