Letter Quads discussion

[abunickabhi]

This thread is created for people who are planning to memo some chunk as a group of four letters. There are 126,720 letter quads for all possible edge cases on the 3x3, so its a big zoo/farm that we have to make up to have a complete system.

In this thread, discussing difficult Letter Quads which could not be classified into a person, action or object/mnemonic is intended. Also how to get efficient and reach the fluency level as letter pairs is expected. Any techniques to do that will be appreciated?

P.S. My personal path as of 2020 end: I have about 65000 letter quads familiar and have them up in an excel sheet. I try to use them in MBLD, as 3BLD is mostly audio and images. I started making Letter Quads early in 2017. No idea when I will achieve fluency in making letter quad sentences.

 

[TheSlykrCubr]

how about replacing certain bad letters with digraphs eg. X = SH, Q = CH etc.

 

[abunickabhi]

I did a Letter Quads experiment today, it was useful in revising all random LQs if they pop up.

 

[abunickabhi]

how about replacing certain bad letters with digraphs eg. X = SH, Q = CH etc.

I am not focussing on audio memo here. People already use quads for edge audio memo. I am talking about letter quads PAO for solid information reduction while memoing big cubes and for MBLD.

 

[abunickabhi]

Reaching about 70,000 known letter quads. Never thought I would reach this number when I started out in 2017, and I had the first had the idea of LQ in 2014.

 

[abunickabhi]

Video of me browsing through the entire letter quads catalogue yo,

 

[abunickabhi]

Interesting discussion on the Yo notation:

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/3920-notation/37257

 

[qwr]

but why? what is wrong with letter pairs

 

[Filipe Teixeira]

I admire your commitment. I wish I had your persistence with memory techniques

teach me master. any tips to a complete noob?

 

[Jam88]

65k done??!! Wow, you could learn 1LLL in a month with that commitment

 

[BenChristman1]

How do you do audio with a letter quad? Wouldn’t it be really hard to find a word that has certain 4 letters in it?

 

[abunickabhi]

How do you do audio with a letter quad? Wouldn’t it be really hard to find a word that has certain 4 letters in it?

Yep the general vocabulary of a person is in the thousands, so we know few thousands objects and actions clearly give or take.
If you are a knowledge freak, you might know more historic people, stuff from around the world and make up the void needed to fill out all the letter quads.

It is hard to complete the letter quad set and there is still a bunch of quads for which I cannot find a useful mnemonic. But overall I think it is doable.
Audio letter quads is not that effective for MBLD as it does not stick for long. It is useful for memoing 3BLD edges though and some top solvers use audio quads.

Person or action or object letter quads is a complete different thing though and gets a lot of preparation to get all the quads assigned to something and have a workable system.

 

[abunickabhi]

65k done??!! Wow, you could learn 1LLL in a month with that commitment

1LLL is a bit more complex in recognition as edges and corners are together. Recognition for BLD cases is super easy as it is just the letter pair or the letter quad. Also the alg for 3-cycles and 5-cycles is easy as it can be written out in Yo notation and it makes sense. But in the case of 1LLL, and some 2gen cases in that, writing in Yo notation doesnt help as it will just be a string which looks like jaajjcjcjcc which is meaningless to memorise.

Lastly, average movecount of 5-cycles is 10.5 STM which is a few moves lesser than 1LLL I guess. The algs are a bit easier on the BLD end I guess.
That's why many pro all-rounders feel that ZBLL is harder than 3-style when they learn both. Same applies to 1LLL and 5-style.

 

[abunickabhi]

I admire your commitment. I wish I had your persistence with memory techniques

teach me master. any tips to a complete noob?

Like if you already have a working letter pair system, next step can be PAO letter pairs.
Then maybe you try audio letter quads, and just make a list of super common 4-letter words like rest,fest,nest,were, veto, nike, bike, hats etc. And hope that they popup in your memo sometime.

 

[GenTheSnail]

While I haven't even learned it yet, from the few videos I've seen on the topic, this seems sort of like stenography cords. I suppose 3BLD is already sort of like that, but 4 letters now, the resemblance is even clearer.

This is really cool! I'm so glad that your investigating new ways to improve BLD techniques. Would these work well in conjunction with 5-style?

 

[abunickabhi]

While I haven't even learned it yet, from the few videos I've seen on the topic, this seems sort of like stenography cords. I suppose 3BLD is already sort of like that, but 4 letters now, the resemblance is even clearer.

This is really cool! I'm so glad that your investigating new ways to improve BLD techniques. Would these work well in conjunction with 5-style?

5-style and letter quads are completely different works. If a person chooses to do 5-style, he can continue memoing as letter pairs, or if a person uses letter quads, he can still use 3-style algs.

Letter quads are quite effective after you reach the critical mass of knowing them. You have to know a lot of them before you start using them fluently in your solves. I started making letter quad images in 2016, and I am still less fluent as compared to letter pairs. There is 102k letter quads I have discovered, and had a rough object, linguistic idea or image associated with it, U' f' L' S L S' L' S L F U.

 

[abunickabhi]

but why? what is wrong with letter pairs

There is nothing wrong with letter pairs. They are quite good, and I used them for over 6 years fluently.

The problem I am trying to solve here is of reduction of information. If I have a letter quad implying an object, say FGCD -fog cloud, I will just have to visualize one object instead of the two object that I need to do for letter pairs FG- faggot, CD-compact disc. So, there is reduction in mental effort here, hence the attempt to complete LQs.

On a side note, I just completed annotating 105k Letter Quads. Took me a little over 4 years to reach this stage, L F2 E' F E F L' !

 

[qwr]

I see. Well I don't really see it as a reduction in mental effort because I think I would confuse myself.

 

[abunickabhi]

I see. Well I don't really see it as a reduction in mental effort because I think I would confuse myself.

I would disagree here, if you are not comfortable with the new and bigger system, it is definitely confusing. LQs were confusing for me from 2016-19. Now I am finally about to have a clear mind about it, and I observe a reduction in mental effort over letter pairs.

So TLDR, it took over 4 years for me to make sure the new system is well prepared (100k objects) and I am able to make images, and reduce the information that I have to memorise. Its tough to explain to a person who has never gone through this process though ngl.

 

[abunickabhi]

Completed 109.5k Letter quads yay, and about half of those are annotated.

My progress with letter quads each year,
end of 2014, - 0 letter quads had a brief thought about letter quads, but did not give it attention as my letter pairs were not good enough. I thought letter quads will be too much work and infeasible af at my current given level.

end of 2016 - 5k letter quads all the easy MU gen algs and setup to that discovered and listed out, referred to Ishaan's algs and Oleg's algs and added them to my sheet.

end of 2017 - 23k letter quads, refuted viability of 5cycle corners, and focus now only on edges. Made a subset of 5-cycles only for Roux LSE.

end of 2018 - 48k letter quads, stopped genning DF buffer and focus solely on UF5. Discussion with Yongqiang peng, regarding the derivation of various categories of 5-cycles and mathematics of it (most of the comms are not of the form [A,B]).

end of 2019 - 58k letter quads, very less free time this year hence only 10k+ LQs added. Also I did not have a laptop, and had to save money to buy one so that I could start genning again. Drilling of algs, and comparing times with 2 3-style exec.

end of 2020 - 104k letter quads, thanks lockdown for creating lot of time. Coded some software for 5-style Yo notation, reconstructions, cube images, latex pdf export, keyboard cube trainer. Completed 17k UF5 algs which rotationless,speed optimal and have 0-2 regrips. March 2021- Currently at 109.5k letter quads done!!! Yippee, near completion. All mirrors and inverses checked.