Older cubers discussions

h2f said:
I've learnt Hoya from your tutorial. This would be great. :)
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Oh man... in that case, I think I should apologize for the quality of some of those earliest videos. I've had some long overdue corrections and retractions :)


mark49152 said:
Were you building each tredge in full before moving on? I think the nice thing about Hoya cross is that you don't have to. You just scan the top half of the cube for pieces with your cross colour on them, and insert them one by one to the bottom layer. I just do them in the order I see them and try to keep moving, with no pauses, even if it takes more D moves. Pieces trapped on the bottom get knocked out as you go.
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Mark, I think you were one of the earliest advocates of the whole "lay 'em as you see 'em" approaches. And at the time, I was opposed to that, at least on 4x4. But I gotta admit... I do that on everything 4 thru 7 now. That's an advantage Hoya users have, even over Yau5.
 
Chree said:
Mark, I think you were one of the earliest advocates of the whole "lay 'em as you see 'em" approaches. And at the time, I was opposed to that, at least on 4x4. But I gotta admit... I do that on everything 4 thru 7 now. That's an advantage Hoya users have, even over Yau5.
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Yeah Hoya is less efficient anyway so we have to use the lookahead advantage as best we can, IMHO. I'm still slow though, and fast guys might disapprove :). One day I might find myself limited by the inefficiency but at least then I'll have a solid foundation to start sneaking in some freeslice.

On another topic, I just slashed 3 mins off my 4BLD PB - 10:49. Nice easy memo, images formed quickly, only one review, no parities. For those interested:-

Centres (audio): EUIF MHSK PXQA LRAT
Edges: NL QT RB DM HV JO GW XI FE IP AC KA
Corners: WF SC KL QU
 
mark49152 said:
Yeah Hoya is less efficient anyway so we have to use the lookahead advantage as best we can, IMHO. I'm still slow though, and fast guys might disapprove :). One day I might find myself limited by the inefficiency but at least then I'll have a solid foundation to start sneaking in some freeslice.
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The only suggestion I might make is that if you're working on a particular tredge... at least TRY to find the rest of it's pieces. Take the world's quickest glance around the cube, just in case there's something on U or F that you can easily insert for that same tredge. And if you can't see anything in that first half a second... yeah... move on.


mark49152 said:
On another topic, I just slashed 3 mins off my 4BLD PB - 10:49. Nice easy memo, images formed quickly, only one review, no parities. For those interested:-

Centres (audio): EUIF MHSK PXQA LRAT
Edges: NL QT RB DM HV JO GW XI FE IP AC KA
Corners: WF SC KL QU
Click to expand...

Nice! Very very nice. That beats the winning time at PDX Cubing Beta.
 
Chree said:
The only suggestion I might make is that if you're working on a particular tredge... at least TRY to find the rest of it's pieces. Take the world's quickest glance around the cube, just in case there's something on U or F that you can easily insert for that same tredge. And if you can't see anything in that first half a second... yeah... move on.
Click to expand...
Well, I don't actively look for its other pieces but if I've already seen them, I will solve them before moving on. Then for choosing what to solve next, if I see two pieces of the same colour I will favour those - solve one and keep an eye on the other. Otherwise I will favour the easiest case to solve (3 mover over 7 mover) even if I have to spin a D2 to align its target. The whole thought process is really a lot like F2L. Also, when starting out, I will look for midges first and try to build a whole cross if I can, but at least 3 pieces, reason being that it avoids/reduces the need for slow slice moves later.

Chree said:
Nice! Very very nice. That beats the winning time at PDX Cubing Beta.
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One of the funny things about bigbld and multi is the way you can still win things while being slow/novice. I was delighted to get 2nd prize at UK Champs with my 24 minute solve (4th place, but 2nd fastest Brit), but of course there were much better solvers than me there, so it felt a bit like a "default" and must have added insult to injury for those who DNF'ed. Faster guys have to take risks to get faster times, but if the risk doesn't work out, the slow guy picks up the prize :).
 
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mark49152 said:
One of the funny things about bigbld and multi is the way you can still win things while being slow/novice. I was delighted to get 2nd prize at UK Champs with my 24 minute solve (4th place, but 2nd fastest Brit), but of course there were much better solvers than me there, so it felt a bit like a "default" and must have added insult to injury for those who DNF'ed. Faster guys have to take risks to get faster times, but if the risk doesn't work out, the slow guy picks up the prize :).
Click to expand...

That's the point. I remeber my first medal on comp - I was second in 4bld with time over 21 minutes. :)

But it looks like now you're much better than few weeks ago.
 
h2f said:
But it looks like now you're much better than few weeks ago.
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My successes are usually around 15-16 mins. Whereas 4BLD used to be a taxing marathon, it now feels much more manageable. I have started doing targeted practice - centres execution sighted, because I'm really slow at it, and also tracing without memo, just like I was advocating for 3BLD. It takes me over 3 mins on average just to find and trace all the cycles! For centres, I use U2 but have learned comms for when one piece is in the U or D face, to avoid the nasty algs. My aim is sub-10 official. Any tips? My execution is about 4:30 but I'm confident I can knock 30s off my centres. So I need to get my trace and memo down to about 5 mins.
 
Any tips?
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Dont ask me. We are almost at the same level. I think you've learnt all you need: U2, some comms and advanced M2 (r2). Just practice. My memo takes me around 5 minutes. Execution around 4:30 like you, but I do centers with 3style. Theres too much thinking how-to-do-it, that's why it takes me so long to make centers. I've never done targeted practice in 4bld - maybe this week I'll do it.
 
Woohoo, I didn't choke on my race to sub 30, got 26.49 this week so I will "graduate" to the race to sub 25. :) Feeling accomplished hahaha.

Then after I posted this I had the biggest run of sub 25 ever for me, including a new PB Ao5 (I'm pretty sure). It was a good night. You know, yesterday I didn't do any real practice for the first time in ever, maybe the break helped!

Screen Shot 2015-12-01 at 11.21.10 PM.png
 
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Jason Green said:
Woohoo, I didn't choke on my race to sub 30, got 26.49 this week so I will "graduate" to the race to sub 25. :) Feeling accomplished hahaha.

Then after I posted this I had the biggest run of sub 25 ever for me, including a new PB Ao5 (I'm pretty sure). It was a good night. You know, yesterday I didn't do any real practice for the first time in ever, maybe the break helped!

View attachment 5698
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Nice progress Jason!!! GJ! Now go for that sub-25. You're almost there.
In contrast I have failed for two weeks straight to get my sub-20 Ao12 after a 1st week were I managed to get a low 19. But I'm so into 2x2 lately that my 3x3 is suffering a bit. As somebody has recently told me, we older cubers cannot affort to be fast at all cube sizes :(
 
Congrats Jason, great results! I'll wait until next weekend with doing round 110, will have to get some more practice solves in first.

I haven't done much solving lately, most of my free time has went into rewriting the tool for training 3-cycles. In retrospect, I'd say that if you do a project in an unfamiliar programming language, after not having written any code at all in 15 years, then losing the results of first 2 days of coding isn't that bad. The part I lost I got rewritten in half the time, half the amount of code lines, with much easier code to update and maintain. I could also design it from the start with all the new features in mind that I had thought of while working on the first version. I've already added lots of nice features, like the possibility to do several cycles in one round, the possibility to only train cycles that include a specified sticker, and the possibility to scroll back and see all intermediate stages of the cube since the last reset. I need one more free evening to add support for custom letter schemes and it should be about done. Oh, and this time I'm doing frequent backups to both internal and external storage devices.
 
Mark has made great thread about advanced M2. After reading it I've started to add some comms to my 4bld solves. But at the moment I've lost my 4x4 times (over 300) because of my cat - he jumped on the table, pushed spacebar and stopped the timer. I wanted to delete last time, instead of it I've deleted all of them. I was so close to sub 1:20.
 
h2f said:
Mark has made great thread about advanced M2. After reading it I've started to add some comms to my 4bld solves. But at the moment I've lost my 4x4 times (over 300) because of my cat - he jumped on the table, pushed spacebar and stopped the timer. I wanted to delete last time, instead of it I've deleted all of them. I was so close to sub 1:20.
Click to expand...

Something similar happened when I dropped my cube on the keyboard and then pressed the spacebar to confirm the deletion:p
 
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