Is Tony Snyder a Hack?

[Silky]

Interested in people's thoughts on Tony Snyder ! At the very least he exists as a controversial figure within the community .

What I've read;
Tony Snyder claims to have been the 3x3 world record holder from 1982 - 2004 .
He claims to have developed the "fastest" and "most efficient" speedcubing method (specifically Snyder 3) .
To my knowledge he has never released any of his algorithm sets (unlike popular speedcubers of his era; Jessica Fredrick, Lars Petrus, Waterman, etc) despite boasting that he created them without any aid from computers . (Although, I believe he has tried to sell books on his method)

It seems to me Tony Snyder makes many extraordinary claims but hasn't backed them up .

If you want to read more about it yourself check out these link and make up your own mind .
https://www.speedsolving.com/wiki/index.php/Anthony_Snyder
https://www.speedsolving.com/wiki/index.php/User:Tony_Snyder
http://www.snydermind.com/cube/methods.html

Bonus !
From Tony's website (http://www.snydermind.com/) :
Flat Earth: "This theory is far more intriguing than intuition suggests, I'd give it a read before putting down Flat Earther's."

 

[shadowslice e]

He's a bit of a hack and has a tendency to exaggerate. Personally, I take everything he says with a metric Carthage of salt.

With regards to the methods (as that's probably where I'm most qualified to comment), snyder1 is nothing special; it's more or less just a standard lbl solution.

Snyder2 is more interesting. Although many people probably thought of the freefop approach to F2L before, he does appear to be the earliest (at least going by the dates on his website which he claims) and his fish and chips LL appears to predate Kenneth Gustavson's posts.

So now there comes the white whale; snyder3. I, personally, have enough respect for Tony to believe he found *something* which would have allowed him to create some sort of method making ai. However, I also believe he vastly underestimated the time and resources that he would have required to run such an algorithm to produce meaningful results as well as overestimated the utility of whatever he found (just for reference, I've been messing around with a greatly simplified version of what he seems to describe and even with the fastest tools and computers, it would still take an obscene amount of time even today, let alone back then).

As with regards to the algorithms for snyder2, the commutators, conjugates and basic ll algs required for fish and chips are easy enough to find by hand assuming you have enough knowledge of those techniques. There are also a few videos floating around of him solving with the method so he can, most likely, at least do the method he describes. Hand generated algorithms were also the norm until relatively recently. But, the problem is that we have little knowledge of much that happened in the "dark ages/generation 2" of speedsolving (to the point where it's possible much of what we're doing today with regard to methods is just rehashes of ideas that were lost)

TL;DR Tony snyder was most likely *one of* the fastest cubers, but I dont think anyone can claim to be *the* fastest during the period he lists as there is not enough information. Snyder1 is boring, Snyder2 exists and is a reasonable speedsolving method though most likely not fit for "world class" use and snyder3 is probably the result of a mind who was a slightly unhinged visionary who conceived of an idea which simply wasn't feasible with the tech at the time (or even now)

TL;DRTL;DR Yeah, snyder is kind of a hack but even a broken clock is right twice a day

E: fixed some typos