I really think there should be SR(State Records)

[Ethan Rosen]

I guess if you were to divide the US, which I don't agree with, it would need to be by region, not state. You can have the West Coast and Middle/North East as two groups, and find some way to divide the rest of the country. From my experience, we generally get the same mid/north eastern group at the competitions over here, so it would work to make that it's own regional group.

 

[Dene]

...as of today 934 US citizens have competed, as opposed to a sum of 933 in the next FIVE countries.

How many of them were serious record contenders though? I don't believe many Americans hold any World Records even, so this statistic has no significance.

 

[qqwref]

I suppose 3x3, 4x4, and 5x5 BLD don't count?

The USA might not hold that many speed world records at the moment, but American competitors have set them very often in the past. I don't think it matters though: how many world records a country has is a completely useless statistic for evaluating how good cubers from that country are as a whole, because one person (Erik, Matyas) can set very many world records if he/she is good enough. Does that mean cubers in general from the Netherlands/Hungary/wherever are better than from other countries? No, not at all.

My point was that the US has many more competitors than any other country. Whether they be experienced or not doesn't really matter: the point I was making was that the number of people you have to compete against when you want to set a national record in the US is very high. Sure, setting a record is only as hard as whoever has the record before you, but if a country has five times as many people doing an event then someone who would have a very good chance to be first in another country might only be ranked 3rd or 4th. Also, setting a regional record varies in impressiveness by the number of people you're contending against. So it is not at all a useless statistic: if every region has about the same number of cubers, all of the regional records become approximately equal in importance; but if they are not then there will always be records which are harder to get, and more impressive, than others regardless of the particular cubers competing for them.

 

[Dene]

I disagree. If there was a region with 100 million cubers, the fastest of which could only speedsolve in 1 minute, then there is nothing impressive about that (except for the fact that some region existed with 100 million people, all of which were cubers).

 

[Karthik]

I disagree. If there was a region with 100 million cubers, the fastest of which could only speedsolve in 1 minute, then there is nothing impressive about that (except for the fact that some region existed with 100 million people, all of which were cubers).

Dene, you missed the point.The probability of such a situation is very low.
If there are a higher number of cubers, then the probability of having good cubers among them is also higher.

 

[AvGalen]

If there are a higher number of cubers, then the probability of having good cubers among them is also higher.

Wrong!

That is not how statistics work in real life. In real life a cluster of a few good cubers would exist no matter how high the number of cubers would be. This is because good cubers in your direct area are a high motivation to become even better. Who do you think would be faster
a) Erik/Joel/Ron after training together for a year
b) 200 schoolkids that all play with the cube during lunch hour?

(another factor in real life is training facilities. If you have just a couple of really good people you get media attention, money, better training facilities, more really good people)

The best example of this in the US seems to be Caltech. Not a very big population, but many really good cubers because they motivate each other.

 

[Jai]

better training facilities

When you say training facilities for cubing, I kinda imagine sitting on a benchpress at a gym, cubing, with your personal trainer beside you telling you to try harder

If there were State Records, there would be records broken at most competitions. Good thing National Records (and presumably State records , too, if they decided to establish them) aren't shown on the competition summaries on speedcubing.com, otherwise the summary would be HUGE.

 

[andrewvo1324]

Imagine that lol, that be crazy. After school you pay money to goto this "FACILITY" sounds like were doing something bad lol..Should be called progam or something.

Mabey a Cubing sumer camp lol.

better training facilities

When you say training facilities for cubing, I kinda imagine sitting on a benchpress at a gym, cubing, with your personal trainer beside you telling you to try harder

If there were State Records, there would be records broken at most competitions. Good thing National Records (and presumably State records , too, if they decided to establish them) aren't shown on the competition summaries on speedcubing.com, otherwise the summary would be HUGE.

 

[AvGalen]

When I think about training facilities I would like:

* Really good light
* Different types of cubes (type A/B/C/25th/DIY-org/etc, Rubiks/EastSheen)
* Different types of lube
* A0 sheets with algs on the wall
* PC's with Acube / Cube Explorer
* Other (better) cubes to practise/race with
* (fake) Audience (to train against competition nerves)
* "tools" to make the heart beat faster (maybe more about this tonight)

benchpresses are only useful if you buy a new Rubiks 5x5x5 (older type)

 

[Swordsman Kirby]

If you want your very own non-personal record, go get better at cubing to obtain one.

 

[masterofthebass]

Ok, well I've skipped the last couple of posts, but in response to Dene's argument against qqwref:

First of all, you can't look at a hypothetical when the actual has been represented. If you look at the US, we have people in the top 5 of almost every event. For 5x5 we have 3 in the top 6, in BLD we have the top 2, 2 in OH, even 1 tied for 3rd in FMC! The US has a lot of people who are successful, so having a NR means that you are top 5 in the world, and if not top 5, automatically top 10. I don't know if that's due to the fact that we have so many people or not, but qq's argument is based off of this. The US just happens to have people, in every event, who are good.


me $.02


PS.... sorry if it seems like I'm bragging about the US, I'm just using facts to back up my argument.

 

[AvGalen]

You are correct about the quality of US cubers Dan, but now make that same list for Hungarian, Dutch and French. All these countries have far less inhabitants compared to the US, yet there are awfully good cubers there and don't think it's just Mátyás, Erik and Edouard (Joël/Ron/Rama, Milan, Thibaut/Jean/Clément are just a couple of other names). Getting a national record in any of these countries is really tough (I still have FMC though )

 

[masterofthebass]

No, I agree that other countries have similar things, with a few cubers dominating in a bunch of events. I made the point somewhere else that except for matyas in frederick, the top 15 5x5ers come from 4 countries. Another one of our problems is that we seem to have "specialists." Either way, I don't think SR are even worth talking about

 

[Karthik]

The best example of this in the US seems to be Caltech. Not a very big population, but many really good cubers because they motivate each other.

But isn't that too small a sample space?
I feel that a country(not a very sparesly populated one) is a much more reasonable and evenly distributed sample space.

 

[AvGalen]

No, that sample space is exactly my point. Really good people often come in clusters that share something. Caltech is a good example of this because it shows that in a small confined community many good cubers exist (wild guess, don't pin me down on the exact numbers: 10 good cubers on a community of < 1000 students), while a much larger community (The state for example) probably doesn't have 10 more equally good cubers.

In case of the Dutch top-cubers (Ron/Joel/Erik/Rama) the community is not defined by a college, but by teacher/student relations starting with Ron (WCA co-founder). Ron taught Joel, Joel taught Erik, and Rama is Ton's "son" (Ron and Ton are really good friends). The teacher/student relation doesn't really exist anymore

 

[Karthik]

Ha ha.Ok, now it does make some sense.

 

[immortalcube]

You can have state records if you establish an American Cubing Association or something similar.

That's what I was about to say...
If it's the World Cube Association, only world records, but an American Cube Association is a different matter entirely. There appears to be no such institution now, so feel free to trademark that name (ACA) before someone else does

Edit: sorry, only saw the first page , haven't been on a computer for three days, and I'm going into withdrawal, I think...

 

[fanwuq]

This ridiculous. There aren't that many cubers for us to do that. Yeah, that would mean I have the record for quite a few provinces and states where I had lived. I'm pretty sure this way some people can get records for just learning how to cube at all. It already feels kinda cheap to have NR in pyraminx. (no one ever participated before.)

 

[hdskull]

WCA now already marks your personal records in ORANGE isn't that not enough? haha.

 

[Dene]

First of all, you can't look at a hypothetical when the actual has been represented.

I'm just going to have to straight up disagree with this. Being trained in Philosophy I have learnt that if an argument can't stand up to any hypothetical situation (as unreasonable as that situation may be) then the argument needs to be re-evaluated. This, of course, makes things extremely difficult. Welcome to Philosophy!

Just my $43 quintillion.