Finally, I thought I was insane!
VLS>ZB
he was asking a question though…
VLS (valk last slot) skips the OLL step entirely every solve, allowing for PLL being the only step in LL. ZBLS orients the edges on top which allows for ZBLL, or 1LLL.
VLS in tern also lets you only 1LLL and has significantly less algorithms than full ZB.
You build the pair -> you do vls -> PLL
i challenge thou to correct me if im wrong ( i probably am) for i am usually very wrong from my lack of understanding
as i’ve mentioned in other threads, no, VLS is NOT better than ZB.
Let’s take two scenarios:
Scenerio A: Your last pair isn’t free
VLS: With VLS, you need to have a free pair, so you would need to turn your current LS case into a free pair, and only then can you actually start solving VLS. This is already an obvious downside.
ZBLS: You can do ZBLS from any LS case, as long as you can recognize and execute it.
So if we were to compare VLS and ZBLS:
VLS: form free pair -> VLS -> PLL
ZBLS: ZBLS alg -> ZBLL
Which is 3 “mini-steps” for VLS, and 2 for ZBLS, which i’m sure you guys can obviously see which one is better.
Scenario B: Your last pair is free
VLS: now, you can go straight into VLS, which makes it more similar to ZBLS. But the problem is that you have extra steps for recog compared to ZBLS, which is just recognizing EO at that point.
ZBLS: All you have to do now is recognize EO, then execute the alg. No CO recog, nothing else, just recognize EO and execute.
So if we were to compare:
VLS: VLS -> PLL
ZBLS: ZBLS -> ZBLL
It looks like VLS is better, right? But it’s still not better because of recog.
For VLS you need to recognize two things (from what i remember): Corner Orientation and Edge Orientation.
For ZBLS you would need to only recognize EO. So now it’s 2 different things to recog for VLS and only 1 thing to recognize for ZBLS.
Let’s say we have an easy 8 move VLS though, how sure are we that doing the VLS won’t just give us an N perm, compared to just inserting the pair then doing ZBLL
In some rare cases, VLS ends up being better than ZBLS, but you don’t really want to be relying on “rare cases” during solves. The only thing VLS is kind of better at than ZB is alg count, but VLS algs aren’t that great either, and you might as well just do LS->OLL->PLL
TDLR; VLS isn’t better than ZB, in almost every way.
