Is Waterman a dead method?

[efattah]

While I am all for getting people into alternate methods, I think it is still a bit presumptuous to say it can definitely reach "world class" times just yet as no one has reached it yet. This is not to say that you can't but I wouldn't speak in absolutes yet. Also, a 45 movecount is not "extremely low" in the grand scheme of things.

Personally I'm not sure you can say it is better yet as it has not been shown to be and I find it gas drawbacks compared to pure waterman though I agree it should be looked at.

Well Waterman's 17.70 average from 1987 stood as the world record for 17 years and even at the 2003 world championships after 21 years of CFOP development, no one could beat the world record average which was set with Waterman. So yes for sure Waterman's method can achieve world class times as it already has. When the Waterman record was finally beaten it was beaten with speed cubes which had just been invented, making further comparisons irrelevant. The 2003 world championship was a fair comparison because the cubes were the same ones that Waterman was using in 1987.

I'm not sure how Waterman has any advantage over WaterRoux? Waterman is essentially a subset of both WaterRoux and LMCF. And in my original post I never implied I could be super fast with Waterman, I was referring to it as a general method.

The fastest Waterman average I have heard of is 12.xx by somrandomkidmike who had some 8 second singles, and he didn't even know a quarter of the algorithms. While these are not world class times today, if you consider there are around 5 Waterman users in the whole world, and none of them know the whole set, statistically that is actually pretty fast.

 

[shadowslice e]

Well Waterman's 17.70 average from 1987 stood as the world record for 17 years and even at the 2003 world championships after 21 years of CFOP development, no one could beat the world record average which was set with Waterman. So yes for sure Waterman's method can achieve world class times as it already has. When the Waterman record was finally beaten it was beaten with speed cubes which had just been invented, making further comparisons irrelevant. The 2003 world championship was a fair comparison because the cubes were the same ones that Waterman was using in 1987.

So petrus can still be used to achieve world class times? Better cubes can influence which methods are most competitive as if we still had terrible cubes like those of rubik's, we would most likely use methods which are the most efficient such as heise or maybe petrus. Roux only really became more viable due to better M-slices and similar developments in cubing hardware.

But do not misunderstand what I'm saying. Yes, I think it is possible Waterman could be used to achieve "world class times", I do not think that it is right to straight up say it can and state it in absolutes.

I'm not sure how Waterman has any advantage over WaterRoux? Waterman is essentially a subset of both WaterRoux and LMCF. And in my original post I never implied I could be super fast with Waterman, I was referring to it as a general method.

Adding a rouxblock into the inspection phase of waterman sort of means you can't solve the corners in inspection so there is a pause there which waterman does not really have from what I've looked at though yes it is possible for 2x2 solvers to 1-look in 80% of solves at an optimistic estimate, they also do not have to take into account all the other moves to solve the FB. If it were possible to do this we would be able to 1 look petrus blocks very easily and at a stretch get it to F2L-1.

The fastest Waterman average I have heard of is 12.xx by somrandomkidmike who had some 8 second singles, and he didn't even know a quarter of the algorithms. While these are not world class times today, if you consider there are around 5 Waterman users in the whole world, and none of them know the whole set, statistically that is actually pretty fast.

So SSC and the variants have world class potential as there are maybe 2 people who have spent any real amount of time using them (and neither of us know the "full" best variant) and the best is something like a 7-8 second single and a 12 average and neither person even really uses the methods as mains? Statistically, that means it is stupidly fast by your assumptions. Your data set is far too small to draw any real conclusions and your guesses are outside the region of reasonable interpolation. it's like using a model which only looks at the first part of the 1980s and concluding that we would have sub-0 times before the new millennium. Again, I understand that it is pretty much impossible to get data like that (I have had the same problems in the past as I'm not exactly as good at promoting stuff as say chris tran and zz-ct)

 

[efattah]

One-looking the corners in LMCF is easy; one looking the corners in WaterRoux is quite a bit harder, and one looking the corners in Waterman is almost impossible as you need to solve an entire layer minus one edge, and then still predict the CLL algorithm. So I still don't see how Waterman could have any advantage over WaterRoux.

Yes I do think SSC could achieve world class times if enough people used it as their main method.

Petrus might achieve world class times too, if more people used it.

If you use the hardware comparison, consider that by 2003 standards when CFOP could not beat Waterman, M-slices on those cubes were impossible (M' = r R'), and so Waterman's method had a severe disadvantage with those original cubes, yet still won.

 

[tx789]

Well Waterman's 17.70 average from 1987 stood as the world record for 17 years and even at the 2003 world championships after 21 years of CFOP development

There weren't any comps or many people cubing back then. I think some people were capable of sub 20 at wc2003 but nerves. I feel that comparison is bad similiar logic would say that CFOP is way better than all other method since it has been the method used by the best in the world almost. Roux would be seen to be very good as well because of Alex Lau. I feel we need someone who was cubing in 2003 to comment on the speeds people averaged at home.