Cubing Savants

[MTGjumper]

I don't necessarily understand savant syndrome and whether the (hypothetical) situation I am going to describe could happen, but bare with me.

How would you feel if a savant with the innate ability to optimally solve a Rubik's cube were to enter the cubing community? For example, they could look at a scrambled cube, and quickly work out the optimal solution in a matter of seconds and execute it. (This sounds like a plausible savant ability, considering their general aptitude in Maths.)

On one hand, this would be beneficial to the cubing community: I would expect such a person could tell us off-hand the maximum number of turns to solve a Rubik's cube, or the number of turns to solve any twisty puzzle. Perhaps they could help develop a new, efficient method that other cubers without their abilties would be able to use to good effect.

However, obviously, such a person might have negative implications on competitions. Even if this person only reached the stage where they could do 3 tps, at an average move-count of ~17.7 moves to solve a cube, this would result in a ~6 second average in competitions. A similar situation would be true for FMC. In such a situation, do you think any action should be took?

Thoughts?

 

[DAE_JA_VOO]

Well, you might be able to tell that the person is a Savant (many savants are pretty useless at most stuff except their "ability"). Lots of them struggle with basic social skills, similar to people with Downs.

I'm not sure what the regulations are wrt to that kind of stuff though. It would be interesting, and i'd love to see something like that.

 

[Vulosity]

Is Yu Nakajima a savant?

A lot of peole tell Dan Brown that he's a savant. Yeah right.

 

[Lucas Garron]

I don't care what (s)he (I'll use male pronouns from now on) would do to the records, he would only contribute a lot.

If he could find a nearly optimal solution, that implies an ability to compute a lot of things. He would be able to give us fantastic algorithms by mentally perusing solutions. Anyhow, his ability would have to "fail" sometime before huge puzzles, and if not, then he would only be able to tell us more fantastic things. We'd be able to learn a lot from observing his approaches/solves.

I don't care if speedsolving, FMC, and BLD records become silly, it would be amazing. Personally, I think even the 3x3x3 is even beyond a realistic savant's ability to optimally and instantly solve, but if it isn't, let him show us!


For a while, I've also wanted to find someone in San Francisco who's really good at memorizing, and teach them BLD. Don't think I ever found any, but I didn't look too hard.

Also, should people with 6 fingers on a hand allowed to use it for OH?

 

[hawkmp4]

So let me get this straight- you would take a savant, possibly (likely) an autistic savant, someone who struggles with social skills, someone who above all wants to be accepted, and restrict them from competing in the one thing that they may be able to do?
And I take great offense to the statement that savants are pretty much useless for most everything except their ability.

 

[Stefan]

This sounds like a plausible savant ability

Hahaha. HAHAHAHAHA.

 

[Bryan]

Basically, you question boils down to:

"If someone was really fast, what should we do?"

Obviously, the answer is nothing.

 

[fanwuq]

I don't think a person can be "CubeExplorer." I don't think savants behave that way. Interesting idea, but it's silly.
Best sentence in this thread:

Also, should people with 6 fingers on a hand allowed to use it for OH?