Physically pipelining cube boxes at scrambling tables

[abunickabhi]

WCA Forum discussion (more relevant place to add to this discussion): https://forum.worldcubeassociation.org/t/physically-pipelining-cube-boxes-at-scrambling-tables/48460

Problem:

• In a cubing round’s group/heat, every competitor has to wait for a variable amount of time between solves depending on the order of scrambling at the scrambling station.
• Waiting variable time makes fair play harder as a competitor who has to wait for periodic intervals will be more focused compared to the competitor who has to figure out why the cube is taking too much time to scramble and arrive for call-out.
• This irregularity between solves occurs both in “fixed seating for ao5” group completion setup and “running + waiting area” group completion setup.
• When with good scramblers and good runners, there is always doses of confusion of the order of cubes to pick up and start scrambling or start sending out.

Proposal:

• Make two cube boxes queues for adding solved cubes to the scrambling table and taking out scrambled cubes from the scrambling table (like a FIFO buffer).
• Introduce two cardboard lines which are glued to the scrambling table, one for pushing in the cubes that arrive to the solving area, and one for pushing the cubes out of the scrambling table.
• Assign two volunteers who can push both the queues in order to maintain a stream of cube boxes. This step can be automated by conveyor belt + computer vision in the future, if it is cheap and easy to use, saving two volunteers whose job is to just push cubes between the rails for little increase in fair play in the competition.

Possible faults and less ROI (return on investment) in this implementation:

• Pipelining the cubes will involve a bigger scrambling table.
• Procuring the rails to constraint the cube boxes is a mechanical engineering problem (a simple one) which makes it a challenge for younger organizers.
• Pushing the cubes through the rails will require two extra volunteers and hence more manpower just to solve a problem that barely anyone has complained about before.
• If there are more than 2 scramblers/runners, this system will still create timing chaos, since each scrambler/runner will pick the next cube according to their speeds and it will not ensure periodic scrambling periods between two attempts for everyone.
• Incidents can still make irregularities in timing which makes solving the problem just impossible and unnecessary.

Personal experience:

I dislike how if messy and chaotic the distribution of cube boxes become especially for fast events. The organizers and delegates have tried to solve this problem partially but not fully, as far as I know. I have seen some optimizations to better the scrambling process.

For instance, one simple solution is to keep solved cubes with box’s open side facing the scrambler and the scrambled cubes upright. The line of sight of the scrambler who is sitting and the line of sight of the runner who is standing is both taken into consideration. This makes choosing the next cube to scramble or pick easier, but it does not solve the problem of which cube to pick in order to make the waiting time for competitor near-periodic.

Another instance is when the scrambling station is vectored with unsolved cubes coming in from the left side of the table and solved cubes going out from the right side of the table. There are no queue of cubes incoming and outgoing the scrambling station which just creates two pools of incoming and outgoing cubes, and large waiting times between two solves in some cases. I realized this a lot in the competition I attended today and hence I decided to discuss some solutions here.

 

[ProStar]

I think improving cube organization could be good, but the variable amount of time between solves per competitor is far from the biggest problem that needs solving. I don’t buy into it massively affecting fair play. I’m all for improving the organization, but requiring a computer system (comps are far from introducing this for more important things, much less this) or multiple extra volunteers seems excessive and not worth it.