Hello, Mark from the UK here!

[mark49152]

Hello! I'm from the UK north west and another 40's cuber who has recently rediscovered a childhood toy and found a new passion for it. I remember being among the fastest solvers in school and being pleased with myself that I could impress my friends and family by solving the cube in less than 3 minutes. Now that I'm in my 40's and nobody cares, I can solve in <50 seconds and improving fast

So I'm an addict again, in part because of all the new stuff there is to learn and understand about the cube and cubing. As well as developing my CFOP skills I am interested in other puzzles, other methods, finding algs, messing with new ideas or substeps, maths and puzzle theory, writing cube-related code, messing with Cube Explorer, analysing efficiency of solves and methods, endless spreadsheets, dismantling and modding, etc etc - basically anything remotely cube-related. Unfortunately my hands have got a bit old and stiff so the other stuff is a welcome substitute when my wrists are too sore for cubing!

i've been lurking on this forum for while and have found it a useful and enjoyable way to satisfy my need for cube-related info and conversation, so I just want to say a proper hello, and thanks for a great forum and community!

 

[MarcelP]

Hey Mark,

Nice to meet you. Welcome!

 

[ThomasJE]

Another UK cuber! Welcome! Have you checked out the UKCA website?

 

[Dylann]

Welcome aboard

 

[Mollerz]

Hey there! Where do you live exactly, I'm currently living in the North-East in Hull, there's nobody else around here as far as I know but there's a couple of cubers who live around Manchester.

 

[mark49152]

It's been about 4 months since I started cubing and it's become a very enjoyable and relaxing pastime and stress relief tool for me. This forum has also proved to be a valuable source of information and support, so many thanks to the admins and everyone who contributes.

I'm going to have less time for cubing over the next few weeks so now seemed a good time to check my progress. Here's a summary of the last 4 months.

The first time I timed myself in November after a few days of learning, I was 1:16 using F2L and 4LLL with multiple sune iterations for corner orientation. During the next few weeks I learned full PLL and OCLL, practised lots, and got down to 1:05.

Based on advice from Speedpicker and others, I timed my substeps and identified F2L as my weakest. I was not finishing F2L until there were 40-50 seconds on the clock. So with lots more free time over Christmas I practised F2L like crazy and got my solves down to 51 seconds. The time it took me to insert 4 pairs came down from 33 to 23 seconds.

Since then, I've continued to practise F2L, learned the dot OLLs, and also worked on improving my PLLs. Drilling PLLs has been great for getting a better feel for the cube and for appreciating the importance of good algs and fingerings (not just optimal move count). I've changed about half my PLL algs and can now do them all with at most one regrip. My average PLL execution has come down from 7 secs to about 4.5 secs for all but the worst cases.

Here's my current performance splits. I do ao12s of these metrics in one session (for consistency) every 1-2 weeks and take my performance as the mean of the last two ao12s, so the numbers below reflect my average performance during Feb 2013. PBs are 37.25 single, 45.27 ao12.

Explanation:

• The "typical" column shows normalized splits as percentages of total solve (credit to Speedpicker for these, as I took the values and the idea from his thread).
• The "target" column shows these normalized splits for my target time of 40 seconds.
• The "timed" column of the top section shows my actual ao12 for each measurement, and the yellow highlights show where I need to improve most to meet my 40 second target.
• The "expected" column shows what my timings would have been if they had had reflected the normalized splits.
• The "variance" column compares "timed" with "expected", and shows how much better/worse I am than expected for my current time, with worse times highlighted in red.
• The "analysis" section shows the same things but broken out for each individual step of CFOP, calculated from the above measurements.

Conclusions: My cross and transition sucks badly, F2l is OK, and LL pretty good, for my time, except for wasting a couple of seconds on slow PLL recognition. I also waste 11.5% (5 seconds) somewhere when doing full solves, compared to what I would expect adding up the individual steps.

Plan: These are my targets for the next 3 months.

• Continue practising F2L and especially cross, using eyes-closed and metronome. Target is 4 seconds cross and 16 seconds for pairs.
• Practise full solves more; I do lots of substep practising and perhaps that's why I'm losing time when stringing it all together.
• Learn some basic two-side PLL recognition cases and get that down to 1.5 seconds including AUF.

Also, I missed the questions asked in previous posts: Mollerz, I'm at the opposite end of the M62. Merseyside. I did take a look at the UKCA website and it's great to see there's a good community here. Don't know if I will have time to come to comps and I'll never be competitively fast, but one day it would be great to make it just for fun.

 

[MarcelP]

Mark, you are definatly taking things serious with analysing your sub steps. You are on the right track, that's for sure! Great progress on your PLL's. I have not started on getting my PLL's down to an acceptable level. I think look ahead is what makes a cuber fast. So I continue to work on that for now.

 

[kinch2002]

Hey UK cuber! Welcome, and hope you have fun on here

 

[mark49152]

Mark, you are definatly taking things serious with analysing your sub steps. You are on the right track, that's for sure! Great progress on your PLL's. I have not started on getting my PLL's down to an acceptable level. I think look ahead is what makes a cuber fast. So I continue to work on that for now.

Excel is my other favourite hobby What are you doing for training lookahead?