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New notation for slice moves?

Anyone think that it might be possible to simply redefine M as clockwise facing R and M' as counterclockwise facing R instead of giving it an entirely new letter like N? People already do this for M2 when writing down algs and pretty always use it for both M2 and M when speaking. If enough people agreed and we all made a universal decision to start defining the slice moves according to R/U/F I think it would probably work.

Edit: There may be a bit of confusion for a year or so but eventually people settle into the new notation and everyone will accept the slice moves as according to R/U/F and things will make a lot more sense (also a lot more convenient since no one wants to say, for example, M2' U M2' U2 M2' U M2'.
 
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About slice moves, a good way to remember their direction is to look at the alphabet: M follows L (as already pointed out by Ollie), and also E follows D.

There was a thread about this same topic from 2011 where someone mentioned that exact same thing about M following L and E following D.
I can't seem to find that thread. It had some other interesting things. :/
 
Don't quite understand what you said there
Nor do I. I did have a better explanation but I've forgotten it... for now I'll just say this: I was trying to follow his logic that one way was definitely 'wrong', and why there is more than one way of looking at it. He's just saying what is easier to do should be the normal turn and the opposite direction, or what's harder to do, should be whatevertheletteris'. Bad way of arguing it, I know, but I've forgotten my main point :fp I think that whatever happens it shouldn't be a random decision. Instead, something like what has been suggested, following rotations, would be better. That is, if we really are going to change it, which is a bit pointless after so long.
Wait what? I thought E follows y
Nope.
 
I just updated RPG for the new N notation. I did it blindly, so i hope it works. With the visual cube, I doubt it supports N, so I would have to go back into it and change N to M' (and rest of Ns) for the generator.

Hopefully this works.
 
Using N sounds pretty dumb to me. As someone pointed out, M stands for middle, what does N stand for? Seems like it will cause some confusion when someone new to cubing is learning the notations.

"R is for right, L is for left, U is for Up, etc. And when you need to turn the middle layer, it's N. I don't know why N but it cannot be M because we used it wrongly previously".

And what about E and S? Do we replace the letters too?

edit: I also think using N for middle slice is just as weird as using M' for what should be M.

inb4 10 years down the road, someone creates a thread asking "why the hell are we using N for middle slice?" lol
 
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Using N sounds pretty dumb to me. As someone pointed out, M stands for middle, what does N stand for? Seems like it will cause some confusion when someone new to cubing is learning the notations.

"R is for right, L is for left, U is for Up, etc. And when you need to turn the middle layer, it's N. I don't know why N but it cannot be M because we used it wrongly previously".

And what about E and S? Do we replace the letters too?

edit: I also think using N for middle slice is just as weird as using M' for what should be M.

inb4 10 years down the road, someone creates a thread asking "why the hell are we using N for middle slice?" lol

I think we should just replace M' with M and vise versa. Imo it's worth a little confusion for year or two to get things right for the long run.
 
Using N sounds pretty dumb to me. As someone pointed out, M stands for middle, what does N stand for? Seems like it will cause some confusion when someone new to cubing is learning the notations.

"R is for right, L is for left, U is for Up, etc. And when you need to turn the middle layer, it's N. I don't know why N but it cannot be M because we used it wrongly previously".

And what about E and S? Do we replace the letters too?

edit: I also think using N for middle slice is just as weird as using M' for what should be M.

inb4 10 years down the road, someone creates a thread asking "why the hell are we using N for middle slice?" lol

E stands for equator and S stands for standing iirc. I don't see why that's weird.

I think we should just replace M' with M and vise versa. Imo it's worth a little confusion for year or two to get things right for the long run.

They are not backwards. You are. It goes clockwise. Therefore it is right. You can't change something we've had for a long time. Period.
 
They are not backwards. You are. It goes clockwise. Therefore it is right. You can't change something we've had for a long time. Period.

It goes clockwise according to the L face but the R face is more "standard". Also why shouldn't the slice moves follow cube rotations? Either slice moves are backwards or cube rotations are.
 
Honestly, we should leave things as they are. Everything is fine. Why reinvent the wheel?

This. People are confused when they first learn it, and I can see why, but like a lot of people have said, you get used to it. Trying to change the notation now would only cause more confusion (I imagine we would have to specify whether we were using "new" or "old" slice notation, etc.).
 
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