How do you look ahead?

[martinvali]

hi,

I have practiced look ahead during f2l for a few days and I would ask you a few questions.

1. When looking ahead during f2l are you looking for corners or edges ( it seems to be too hard for me to find both corner and edge without pausing. )

2. When you are inserting an f2l pair are you looking for an edge/corner from the yellow side (after making white cross) or from empty f2l slots?
Sorry for my bad English and thanks for reading

 

[shadowslice e]

1. When looking ahead during f2l are you looking for corners or edges ( it seems to be too hard for me to find both corner and edge without pausing. )

You should be looking to find a matching pair (both the corner and the edge at the same time). The idea is that you should be looking for an easy pair but at your level you should probably just be training yourself to look for the pairs as quickly as possible and then being able to solve them without expending too much mental capacity so you can find the next pair to solve while you solve that one.

2. When you are inserting an f2l pair are you looking for an edge/corner from the yellow side (after making white cross) or from empty f2l slots?

I think I might be misunderstanding what you mean here but you should be finding any edge that is solved into the F2L (so if you start with white cross you'll look for any edge that has neither white or yellow in it and any corner that has the white on it as well as those two colours).

 

[SenorJuan]

I think in the No.2 question, he means do you look for one of your pair on the U layer then try and find it's buddy, ...or do you look for one of the pair in the first two layers and then look for it's buddy.?
I would say the first of these is most likely to succeed. The latter will cause the undesireable cases where both the edge and corner of a pair are in different first-two-layer slots.

If you learn all the ways of moving a corner from the first layer up to correctly match it's edge buddy (either as an adjacent 2x1x1 block, or the 'distant pair' ), and similarly all the ways of moving an edge from the middle layer to the top layer, then you're well on your way to learning 'intuitive F2L'.
There's also the cases where both are on the top layer, but need seperating / shuffling about, but you've probably got some of those situations sorted out already.

But I'm sure that those who have mastered F2L look-ahead will indeed see both elements of the pair, be aware of what slots are empty/solved, and know which slot the pair belong in during their lookahead.

 

[Micah Walker]

To answer the first question, you have to learn how to look at edges and corners simultaneously (just practice a lot)! And for the second question, you just kind of have to watch both the top layer and the slots. Typically you want to find your next pair as your building/ inserting a pair and that involves watching both the top layer and the pair slots!
F2l lookahead is insanely complicated because you basically have to retrain your brain! The best way to get better at it is to do lots of slow solves (to practice how lookahead works) and fast solves (in order to be able to actually use those tricks in your solves).