Mr.Roux86
Member
I have just finished working on my cubing science experiment, which I can officially call The Effect of Scramble Distance on Human Solvers.
What does this mean? Well you might have heard that a Rubik’s cube can always be solved in 20 moves no matter what (this is called God’s number). This is true, but not every scramble takes 20 moves. 20 is only the maximum, we can go lower. This is the distance of a scramble. Distance 20 is the highest possible distance, but the average distance is 18. In my experiment, I tried to see if there was a correlation between distance and solving times. Do people solve worse on distance 20 scrambles vs distance 18? In my research paper, you can see trend lines, not only for every person who took the survey, but also trends for certain demographics within cubing itself.
Here is my formal abstract:
The purpose of this project is to investigate the relationship between the 'scramble distance' of a Rubik's Cube and the time it takes for human solvers to complete the scramble. I hypothesize that if scramble distance and human solving times are directly related, then a higher distance scramble will lead to higher human solving times. My procedure for this task is to have volunteers solve a variety of predetermined scrambles and record their times doing so. I will compare this data across a variety of participants to see how solve times relate to God's number and the scramble distances before it. I also would like to see if there are additional trends based on solving methods and experience.
Is there a trend? Yes, but it’s not that simple.
I am not going to write an entire essay for now, but if you want to know an overview of everything I studied, you can watch this video which shows most of my information in a power point presentation.
Video:
If you want to go further in depth, and know absolutely everything I studied, then you can read my research paper.
Paper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YPwHi6JEOOJnFFQIeQaTU4hJnfZE_6XD_TsrDpllqMk/edit?usp=sharing
Thank you so much to everyone who participated, in the end, 133 people helped me with this, and I am very thankful for that.
What does this mean? Well you might have heard that a Rubik’s cube can always be solved in 20 moves no matter what (this is called God’s number). This is true, but not every scramble takes 20 moves. 20 is only the maximum, we can go lower. This is the distance of a scramble. Distance 20 is the highest possible distance, but the average distance is 18. In my experiment, I tried to see if there was a correlation between distance and solving times. Do people solve worse on distance 20 scrambles vs distance 18? In my research paper, you can see trend lines, not only for every person who took the survey, but also trends for certain demographics within cubing itself.
Here is my formal abstract:
The purpose of this project is to investigate the relationship between the 'scramble distance' of a Rubik's Cube and the time it takes for human solvers to complete the scramble. I hypothesize that if scramble distance and human solving times are directly related, then a higher distance scramble will lead to higher human solving times. My procedure for this task is to have volunteers solve a variety of predetermined scrambles and record their times doing so. I will compare this data across a variety of participants to see how solve times relate to God's number and the scramble distances before it. I also would like to see if there are additional trends based on solving methods and experience.
Is there a trend? Yes, but it’s not that simple.
I am not going to write an entire essay for now, but if you want to know an overview of everything I studied, you can watch this video which shows most of my information in a power point presentation.
Video:
If you want to go further in depth, and know absolutely everything I studied, then you can read my research paper.
Paper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YPwHi6JEOOJnFFQIeQaTU4hJnfZE_6XD_TsrDpllqMk/edit?usp=sharing
Thank you so much to everyone who participated, in the end, 133 people helped me with this, and I am very thankful for that.