Reminder: If you have a comment on the Regulations, or a question about a change, post in the relevant thread or email the WRC. Else, we won't see your comments. Nevertheless, I'll address some points here:
For everyone who's wondering, the latest draft of the WCA Regulations is
here.
Takafumi Haseda (who generated this scramble) said that he used Cube Explorer 5.00 on Windows Vista,
and after shortening the generated scramble, it became 16-move (not sure it's optimal or not).
So, as Ardianto expected, the scramble was generated in accordance with the reguration.
Although it is allowed, maybe that doesn't answer your question: "
Should that be allowed?"
I think there are two points to be discussed:
- Should a scramble that can be solved with 16-move or shorter be allowed?
- Even though such a scramble is allowed, the generator should be reasonably long in order to avoid cheating or expectation or something bad.
IMO at least the latter point should be regulated. For example "the length of the generator should be 20 or longer."
The first point is a question of scramble filtering. In short, the answer is probably yes. It doesn't matter that the generator is 16 moves. What matters is that it is a random state.
The only concern is that a 16-move scramble might be slightly easier to solve in fewer moves than a common average scramble. But his is *very* hard to measure, and very difficult to filter.
About hiding the length of the scramble by always providing a 20 move generator for FMC: I don't know what's best. If you have good arguments (i.e. what sort "cheating" or "something bad" things might happen), please post them in one of the threads for feedback about the Regulations, or contact the WRC.
Do you mean "L' R" is allowed but "M" is not allowed?
Personally that doesn't matter, but I don't understand why slice move is prohibited...
I don't think the regulation contributes to the further development of cubing world.
The "further development of cubing world" is a different goal from providing good notation/metric specifications in the WCA Regulations. Slice moves are still the same (I'm personally still going to use M, E, and S on the internet), they're just not part of the official WCA notation anymore.
Some possible reasons:
-1- Maybe 2013 brings us the introduction of a standardized score-sheet with 10 letters per line (as used during N8W8 and Eindhoven Open)
-2- Maybe Slice moves give too many errors for competitor and or "results-checker"
In my opinion these arguments are not enough reason to ban slice moves.
-1- This enables fast counting of moves, 10 HTM per line BUT apart form the slice move issue competitors may cross out a move, creating a line with 9 moves.
So even with slice moves prohibited, the judge still needs to count properly.
-2- If you use slice moves you should know their notation and a judge should know it too. (I admit being a slice-noob, I once spend 15 minutes to get a TMOY solution to work but just couldn't
)
The official scrambler wil be TNoodle, which does have a standardized score sheet. The Regulations don't require competitors to use the score sheet, but we've found that it really helps for keeping track of the sheets and grading competitor solutions.
We've removed slice moves because the scramblers don't use them, and because they are not necessary for FMC. Advanced FMC solvers generally don't need (or even avoid) them, and it helps keep things simple for competitors and judges. In my experience, competitor and judges often get confused about slice moves, or at least have to be a lot more careful about them.
It also makes the Regulations simpler, because every written move counts as one move.
And what about cube turning notations, like x, y and z?
x, y, and z are staying in the Regulations. Clément suggested removing them because they're also arbitrary and confusing, but they're much more common than [r],
, [f] notation, so we've decided to keep them for now.
