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(New) What cubes should be added to the WCA events list?

What cubes should be added to the WCA?

  • Curvy copter

    Votes: 42 18.8%
  • Team blind

    Votes: 78 34.8%
  • 2x2 OH

    Votes: 45 20.1%
  • 2 3x3's at once/double OH

    Votes: 47 21.0%
  • kilominx

    Votes: 136 60.7%
  • ghost cube

    Votes: 11 4.9%
  • mirror cube

    Votes: 68 30.4%
  • redi cube and mosaic cube

    Votes: 73 32.6%
  • master kilominx

    Votes: 37 16.5%
  • gear cube

    Votes: 26 11.6%
  • master pyraminx

    Votes: 41 18.3%
  • feet

    Votes: 32 14.3%

  • Total voters
    224

One Wheel

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Amen to that. Some events would, in my opinion, honestly be better off removed.
(The ones I'm thinking of are 3WF, 3FMC, 7x7, or maybe Clock)

I personally strongly oppose removing Feet, FMC, and 7x7, and don’t see a really good argument for removing clock even though I don’t especially enjoy it myself.

If we were seriously considering adding events I don’t believe that clock has enough similarity to current events to recommend it, and hardware is definitely an issue, but absent a strong argument for change I believe tradition is a strong enough argument to keep it.

7x7 doesn’t add as much variation as 6x6, but with better hardware, fewer possible parities, and more room for error in a longer solve it is perhaps a more accessible event for beginners than 6x6.

FMC is the (almost) no holds barred pursuit of absolute efficiency in solving. It is different than other events, I don’t especially enjoy it myself, and single world records are getting a bit silly, but it definitely deserves a place in the WCA.

Feet holds a place between OH and FMC in how much it relatively rewards good turning speed vs. efficiency. Furthermore, it’s lack of popularity means that competitive times are accessible to cubers that might not have he natural talent or thousands of hours of practice time necessary to achieve competitive times on other puzzles.
 

KingCanyon

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Curvy copter is pretty easy to learn and I'm sure new methods will be developed if it becomes official/new hardware. The curvy copter is pretty different than a regular 3x3 as it jumbles. Its turning style is very different than any other event and is pretty interesting.
 

Kit Clement

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Update: I just contacted the WCA inquiring about adding the curvy copter as an event. I will wait for their response.

Thanks, this accomplishes nothing except giving my wife one more email to give a canned response to tonight.

The best path to something becoming an official event is to have the event held unofficially in many places with enough participation to show there is interest.
 

KingCanyon

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Thanks for the response, Kit. Sorry for the mail that I sent, I guess I just didn't think it through. I think that this method probably would work better just because it shows how many people care for the event and if it's reasonable to hold officially. One example would be how they held kilominx at Veteran's Day Open 2017.
 

One Wheel

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The best path to something becoming an official event is to have the event held unofficially in many places with enough participation to show there is interest.
I need to start checking about a venue, I’m hoping to organize a comp in December with feet as the primary event, and hopefully 4x4 WF as a side event.
 

xyzzy

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Kilo and Redi would VERY quickly come down to just luck, just like 2x2, pyra, and skewb.
Kilominx isn't nearly as luck-heavy as those other events. How frequently do you see stuff like a one-move layer? That's right, the answer is basically never, even if you're full CN. (Back-of-the-envelope calculation says it's around 1/31000, which is less than the probability of getting a 4-move 222 scramble (1/1989), a 7-move skewb scramble (1/9.8), a 6-move pyra scramble (1/414), a ≤9-move Redi scramble (1/4365), or a one-move cross on 3×3×3 (1/1987), and also pretty close to a full cross skip on 3×3×3 (~1/32000).)

It's analogous to a 2×2×2 in the sense that it has only corners. It is absolutely not analogous in the sense that it has a small state space, which it doesn't: the state space is much smaller than a megaminx's, sure, but still a few orders of magnitude larger than a 3×3×3's.

The problem with Curvy Copter is that jumbling most likely makes developing a random-state scrambler (or even a random-move scrambler for that matter) very difficult, even more so figuring out how to generate the cube image in a jumbled state, and they couldn't just have a no-jumbling rule because it would be incredibly difficult to regulate. The hardware for CC isn't great, but I'm sure it would very quickly improve if it became an official event, similar to what happened with Skewb.

I know jack about the edge-turning puzzles (i.e. I might be very wrong here) but it honestly wouldn't seem too difficult to come up with a scrambler. Just do it like a square-1: pick a random shape according to the Markov steady-state distribution, then fill in the pieces, and finally solve and invert.

… And then I did a bit of searching and found this TP thread about enumerating the possible shapes, and (i) it seems very nontrivial (unlike a square-1, which doesn't jumble) and (ii) it seems to be mechanism-dependent (see also Jaap's Puzzle Page's note about how you might be able to force a technically-illegal turn through on the Curvy Copter). Also, it might suffer from the opposite problem of lolscrambles: with "proper" scrambling (whatever "proper" means), you can occasionally get shapes that are much more difficult than usual to solve. (Kinda like how, on a square-1, kite-square is a really annoying shape to deal with for people who are still using beginner cubeshape methods? Except that a Curvy Copter has so many different shapes that it's not realistic for anyone to just learn them all.)

(This is all very interesting and I am now compelled to get a Curvy Copter for myself.)
 

OreKehStrah

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Kilominx isn't nearly as luck-heavy as those other events. How frequently do you see stuff like a one-move layer? That's right, the answer is basically never, even if you're full CN. (Back-of-the-envelope calculation says it's around 1/31000, which is less than the probability of getting a 4-move 222 scramble (1/1989), a 7-move skewb scramble (1/9.8), a 6-move pyra scramble (1/414), a ≤9-move Redi scramble (1/4365), or a one-move cross on 3×3×3 (1/1987), and also pretty close to a full cross skip on 3×3×3 (~1/32000).)

It's analogous to a 2×2×2 in the sense that it has only corners. It is absolutely not analogous in the sense that it has a small state space, which it doesn't: the state space is much smaller than a megaminx's, sure, but still a few orders of magnitude larger than a 3×3×3's.



I know jack about the edge-turning puzzles (i.e. I might be very wrong here) but it honestly wouldn't seem too difficult to come up with a scrambler. Just do it like a square-1: pick a random shape according to the Markov steady-state distribution, then fill in the pieces, and finally solve and invert.

… And then I did a bit of searching and found this TP thread about enumerating the possible shapes, and (i) it seems very nontrivial (unlike a square-1, which doesn't jumble) and (ii) it seems to be mechanism-dependent (see also Jaap's Puzzle Page's note about how you might be able to force a technically-illegal turn through on the Curvy Copter). Also, it might suffer from the opposite problem of lolscrambles: with "proper" scrambling (whatever "proper" means), you can occasionally get shapes that are much more difficult than usual to solve. (Kinda like how, on a square-1, kite-square is a really annoying shape to deal with for people who are still using beginner cubeshape methods? Except that a Curvy Copter has so many different shapes that it's not realistic for anyone to just learn them all.)

(This is all very interesting and I am now compelled to get a Curvy Copter for myself.)
Definitely pick one up! It’s pretty fun and insteresting to solve. I’m still in the camp that thinks that at least mutually scrambles are better off to be done with no jumbling moves. It would significantly reduce the headache of organizing and accurately scrambling.
 

One Wheel

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I’m still in the camp that thinks that at least mutually scrambles are better off to be done with no jumbling moves. It would significantly reduce the headache of organizing and accurately scrambling.

Allowing jumbling is far better: if the puzzle ends up in a position that can only be reached by jumbling, how can you decide if it’s a misscramble (and thus merits an extra attempt) or if the competitor did the jumbling, thus making it a DNF? Better to allow jumbling, and a misscramble is just a misscramble, no DNF or extra attempt, you just have to solve to puzzle.
 

OreKehStrah

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Allowing jumbling is far better: if the puzzle ends up in a position that can only be reached by jumbling, how can you decide if it’s a misscramble (and thus merits an extra attempt) or if the competitor did the jumbling, thus making it a DNF? Better to allow jumbling, and a misscramble is just a misscramble, no DNF or extra attempt, you just have to solve to puzzle.
There’s no point in performing jumbling moves with normal scrambling. It’s not harder than checking megaminx if it’s correct or not.
 
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There may be more shapes for curvy copter than for squan, but there should not be so many that are reachable that is it outside the realm of computer calculation. It should be reasonably possible to encode the jumbling turning rules and do a brute force search for all possible shapes (not that I would want to).
 

Sion

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There’s no point in performing jumbling moves with normal scrambling. It’s not harder than checking megaminx if it’s correct or not.

It's better the scrambles come with the cube jumbled, as it goes along with capabilities deliberately given to the puzzle.

Jumble-Free scrambles on curvy copter is almost like requiring squan scrambles to only be in cubeshape.
 
Last edited:

OreKehStrah

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It's better the scrambles come with the cube jumbled, as it goes along with capabilities deliberately given to the puzzle.

Jumble-Free scrambles on curvy copter is almost like requiring squan scrambles to only be in cubeshape.
It’s definitely more interesting. Good luck with notation
 
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