Megaminx race!

(X) said:
That's not my point at all. If you're going to have something that resembles a serious competition, you should use official or semi official scrambles.
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It's faster to scramble with 50 moves. There's not much of a difference, and if you find out why WCA choose 70 instead of 50 then use that reason otherwise you can't say "its what WCA thinks." back it up if you want to argue. WCA could have randomly made that rule, or it could have be Stefan's choice when he made up how to scramble it. You want to argue ask one of them! Until then shut up about Emolover's choices. They're his choices and he can do what he wants.

(X) said:
The scrambles are ****ed up, there should be 7 lines, you've got 5.
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For one this doesn't make anysence, the 7 lines thing just makes it easier to read. Look at cubemania! It's all run together, But it's not question. WCA just has 7 sets of moves, Alternating with R and D ending with a U or U'. Get your facts right.

Oh and @ Emolover
I've been wanting to make this race for about a year, but never thought people would participate on time :P
I'll take one of my Ao40 a day out for this. I wish I was faster at megaminx :P (1:15is)
I'll be sure to compete, maybe Wendsday if my friend doesnt come over.
 
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Round 1 2:38.47 Goal; Sub 2

2:46.69, 2:49.63, 2:28.01, 2:35.39, 2:44.17, 2:54.64, 2:09.08, 2:27.97, 2:21.49, 2:51.24, 2:43.51, 2:36.63

Honestly I'd rather have an average of 5 format, but this works fine.

For the last six I did them standing up. I seem to do better for some reason.
 
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(X) said:
Yeah, they just randomly chose 70 moves. Do you think they want as long scrambles as possible?
They want their competitions to flow nicely...
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You were defending it but now you not? :fp


y235 said:
Round 1
Goal - sub3
I will do the solves later
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This isnt the weekly forum competition's, it doesnt matter about spot holding.
 
(X) said:
Yeah, they just randomly chose 70 moves. Do you think they want as long scrambles as possible?
They want their competitions to flow nicely...
Click to expand...

There was debate in the Yahoo! group a couple of years ago (starting post for that thread: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/speedsolvingrubikscube/message/41005) over the issue that 70 moves may not be sufficient. It is clearly a very small subset of the possible states of the megaminx (although that doesn't necessarily matter that much for competition purposes), and the initial study in that thread indicated that many more moves might be required to give a good scramble. I hope Stefan will chime in here - I wonder what his current opinion on the subject is. I'm not sure I know all of the debate that has gone on with regard to the megaminx scrambles, and I'd love to know the current opinion.

I know that the week we switched from the old-style megaminx scrambles (if you never tried them, be thankful - they were awful to apply!) to the new ones, my times instantly dropped by 30 seconds or so. Admittedly, though, that may have happened because I was no longer exhausted from applying the scramble. :)
 
Mike Hughey said:
There was debate in the Yahoo! group a couple of years ago (starting post for that thread: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/speedsolvingrubikscube/message/41005) over the issue that 70 moves may not be sufficient. It is clearly a very small subset of the possible states of the megaminx (although that doesn't necessarily matter that much for competition purposes), and the initial study in that thread indicated that many more moves might be required to give a good scramble. I hope Stefan will chime in here - I wonder what his current opinion on the subject is. I'm not sure I know all of the debate that has gone on with regard to the megaminx scrambles, and I'd love to know the current opinion.

I know that the week we switched from the old-style megaminx scrambles (if you never tried them, be thankful - they were awful to apply!) to the new ones, my times instantly dropped by 30 seconds or so. Admittedly, though, that may have happened because I was no longer exhausted from applying the scramble. :)
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I couldn't fathom doing a 500 move scramble in the old scrambler to just be positive that its 100% random.
 
emolover said:
I couldn't fathom doing a 500 move scramble in the old scrambler to just be positive that its 100% random.
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Daniel Hayes was talking about the new scrambler (the one you're using), not the old one - at the time he wrote this, we had just switched to Stefan's new scrambling system from the old way. And you can see that, with the current scrambler, according to his calculations, the confidence that the scrambles approximate true random in the long term is just 1.7% for 70 moves, and 0.9% for 50 moves. (Assuming his calculations were correct - I'm not sure anyone else ever verified his results.)

He actually didn't try the old scrambler because modifying his program to handle it was too difficult to bother with. I'm guessing the old scrambler would have done better, but admittedly that's just a guess. It doesn't matter, though, because even doing 10 moves with the old scrambler (the official number of moves for a scramble was 60) was agony. Here's the old scrambler if you're interested in seeing what it was like - try it and see how painful it was back then. (a was the unlabeled back face)
 
How is the randomness of scrambles calculated? Is it to do with the possible permutations, because then megaminx should be 50 moves because it's permutations is less that a 5x5 but more than a 4x4. Please correct me if i'm wrong. :)
 
MaeLSTRoM said:
How is the randomness of scrambles calculated? Is it to do with the possible permutations, because then megaminx should be 50 moves because it's permutations is less that a 5x5 but more than a 4x4. Please correct me if i'm wrong. :)
Click to expand...

The "randomness" in the reference that I gave earlier is defined in that post on the Yahoo! group, so you can read about it there.

The reason that your logic on number of moves does not apply here is that Stefan's method of scrambling (using only R and D 2-step moves, with an occasional U move thrown in) is more restrictive (and hence less fully-scrambling) than a normal random scramble such as the ones used for 4x4x4 or 5x5x5. Note that the number of possible states of a megaminx using the official WCA 70 move scrambles is MUCH smaller than the total possible states of a megaminx. The vast majority of possible scrambles on a megaminx have no chance of occurring in a WCA competition (unless the scramble is misapplied). This is not nearly as true for 4x4x4 or 5x5x5. (I don't know if anyone has ever determined God's number for 4x4x4 or 5x5x5, so I don't know if all scrambles are possible with the official scrambler, but surely most are.)
 
James Ludlow : Round1

Goal : Sub2

{2.14.36 2.19.54 (2.07.63) 2.09.45 2.10.11 2.14.32} {2.26.34 2.31.43 2.18.63 2.17.55 (2.45.36) 2.21.36} = 2.18.31

Comment - Done in two sessions of six. Clearly, when I'm doing well I should carry on, because the next session might suck.
 
Race to sub 1:30 Average

2:13.03, 1:43.86, 1:32.74, 1:50.52, 1:29.86, 1:54.66, 1:54.57, 1:36.29, 1:38.91, 1:45.51, 1:50.50, 1:50.97

2.13 was a POP.

Average of 12: 1:45.85
 
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