Possible 2011 WCA Regulations Changes

Well, I admit it would be fun! And it definitely favors my style, so it doesn't hurt me at all.

I guess I'm wondering what the people who have traditionally always loved fewest moves think of this. If they're for it, it might be a good idea. It does seem like it might create more interest in fewest moves as an event.
 
This is serious and not a joke. I would really like the WCA to allow the use of headphones during our solves. It makes me concentrate alot more.
 
About FMC:
1. Luck is not a crime
2. 'Trying over and over until they get lucky' is not the same as a n00b getting skips, forcing 'luck' and getting lucky is not the same.
3. In 30 minutes I find something between 45 and 33 moves as safety solution, that's a big margin. After one hour my results are more consistent, and therefore I think it is not that bad the way it is. Best would be a mean of 2 or 3, but then also a total time of 2 or 3 hours... don't see that happen really. Maybe we are not ready for FMC with 30 minutes per cube yet, but at the moment I don't really like the idea to rush even more. The challenging thing about FMC is to find something really good since you have an hour, finding 2 whatever-solutions is not really satisfactory I think..
4. Its the nature of the cube to be unpredictable, an occasional skip for a n00b might happen. Still the average move count for a normal solve is about 55, with a PLL skip this is like 43 moves, which is a very lousy FMC result. With some additional 3 move pairs (assuming CFOP) the n00b can get maybe a 36?
Chances of this last example are already very small, I don't consider myself to be among the top-FMC cubers but if I don't find something better than that 36 I know I just messed up myself...
5. Maybe Erik's way should be tried out at the weekly contest here? The idea and intentions are good for sure!
 
I have agree with Erik here, I thought part of the point of FMC was trying to find lucky continuations. I thought that was the whole point of NISS as a solving strategy, at least that's how I use it. When I am at a point where I have many continuation options, say at the 2x2x3 with all oriented edges, then I will try each promising continuation AND I will use NISS on each of these continuations as well. I thought the whole point was to find the set of turns that gives you the best possible continuation. What better way to do this than to double your number of continuations at every step with a strategy like NISS? Now I don't consider myself an FMC expert; I've only gotten sub-30 once and that was not in official competition. But still, finding a lucky or overly easy continuation for each step is always what I am looking for when faced with a decision in FMC. Does that mean that since I strive to maximize my "luck" that I am, in fact, not an FMC solver?
 
What the hell? People are talking as if advocates of a mean-type FMC think that is the True Fewest Moves Style and that all FMCers should immediately like it. This is ridiculous.

Here's the thing: single FMC in an hour, and doing two or three FMCs in an hour or 90 minutes or whatever, are very different events in terms of strategy and feel. In fact this is the whole point of arguing for a change - it wouldn't be interesting to change it if the differences were minimal. Comparing who would do well on each event, the old one favors:
- knowing lots of techniques (having lots of stuff to try)
- more complex techniques that might take a while
- being lucky
whereas the new one favors:
- consistency
- blockbuilding ability
- speed (in all aspects of the FM event)

I haven't yet really gotten to the point where an hour feels like not enough time, but I'd say you can try a lot of stuff in an hour. If you optimize your approach (as far as how to write stuff down, how to use stickers and the 3 cubes to maximum effect, etc) you can really get a lot done in 60 and even 30 minutes, and I wouldn't say spending only 30 minutes on a solution means it will be bad. How many times have I heard someone with an amazing FMC result tell me "yeah, I found this in 5/10/15 minutes, and couldn't get anything better"? If that happened in the mean style, instead of sitting there for 45 minutes brute-forcing other possibilities (or simply handing in your solution and walking out), you'd realize you were done with that scramble and be able to spend extra time on the other scrambles. Maybe you'll find that you need it.

I also kinda feel that it would be more interesting to have 3 things to work on for 90-120 (say) minutes would be more interesting than working on one thing for an hour. I remember that in math contests having three problems to work on was really nice because if you got stuck or bored on one you could switch to another and see if you could make any headway on that. There were also opportunities to optimize your approach, like deciding whether to go all-out on one problem and write up the solution when it came, or whether to try to get as far on each as you could and then spend the last half hour writing. Of course, I also really like the idea of having more attempts - a best of 2 or 3 round in FMC (or multiple rounds) is impractical in most competitions, and would be longer than a single 90-minute round.
 
I think the part that people are having trouble swallowing is the fact the the move counts will probably not be sub 30 given only 30 minutes per cube.

although I like the idea about having less time, it is arguable that it would make it too difficult for some people to get solutions. but if FMC became a mean of 2 or 3 then it would become impossible to do in competition because it would be a 2-3 hour event. I think that 2 solutions in 90 minutes is entirely reasonable if 60 minutes is not enough time.

something should definitely be done though because the rest of the WCA events are based on averages or means.
 
Last edited:
I DON'T spend 45 minutes on finding a lucky ending. I spent 45 minutes on finding a GREAT (often optimal) beginning. That beginning can be a 2x2x3 block, an "all edges solved and some corners as well", an "all corners solved and some edges as well". If you are doing cross/f2l/oll/pll with a skip you are doing FMC wrong. Pre-moves, inverse scramble/NISS, insertions and adding 1 or 2 moves inside the start to orient/permute a few of the unsolved pieces all require more time than just inserting a few pairs differently to try to get a skip. Shortening the time for FMC would actually favor the ones trying to get lucky cases.

There are at least 4 ways of getting good FMC results: Luck, Brute-forcing, Knowing lots of cases/algs, advanced tricks like described above. And of course a combination of all of the above will lead to the best result in general.
I DO like the idea of doing an average of 3 or even mean 3/5 as it will allow for more tactical choices and results better representing skill. Single results will not be comparable with current results though just because giving someone multiple scrambles will already add an unfair advantage for new results. This sounds like something that could be perfectly tested with a few forum competitions. I will think about it for a bit more and then post a "Trial for new FMCs" thread in the forum competitions thread

Scrambling Magics 2D will result in a very limited amount of possibilities. Scrambling Magics in 3D is an idea that I have thought about and discussed with several other people that actually DO know how to solve really randomly scrambled Magics (fast), but we never could come up with a notation. The only thing we agreed upon was that it would be interesting to allow going from scrambled state to either 1 of the 2 solved states so tactic would be involved instead of just "get it 2D, get it 2 by 4/6", solve"

Inspecting OH with only 1 hand was done in the past and was changed because it wasn't a good idea. No way is that going to be changed back. Doing other puzzles OH I have no problems with at all, but I DO think we are thinking about adding too many events. As noted before that is not a problem in general (just don't host an event if there is no time), but it would be a problem for a Worlds or other HUGE tournament (Euro/Asia/US)

@Stefan: Could you PM or publicly explain what I misunderstood about the numbers from Jaaps 2x2x2 possibilities page?
 
AvGalen said:
Shortening the time for FMC would actually favor the ones trying to get lucky cases.
Click to expand...
Actually, I think it would favor the ones who are skillful enough to find a good solve relatively quickly, at least in the average ranking. If you don't have the skill to get a nice solve on 2 of the scrambles with no luck, you won't have enough time to get 3 lucky solves.

AvGalen said:
Single results will not be comparable with current results though just because giving someone multiple scrambles will already add an unfair advantage for new results.
Click to expand...
The only unfair advantage I see is that if you have more than an hour overall someone could spend the whole time and run with it. If you think 3 scrambles is an unfair advantage to the single rank, I'll point out that it's clearly worse than having 3 FMC rounds/solves right now, which would give you a full hour for each, and that this is quite possible to do in a competition right now. I guess my point was not really that there is no way to benefit from the mean-of-3 round, but rather that any advantage is small enough that we don't need to throw out the old results.

AvGalen said:
@Stefan: Could you PM or publicly explain what I misunderstood about the numbers from Jaaps 2x2x2 possibilities page?
Click to expand...
I believe the problem was that you forgot to add in the number of 5-move cases.
 
qqwref said:
I believe the problem was that you forgot to add in the number of 5-move cases.
Click to expand...

The problem is that Arnaud took only in consideration the cases which are n moves away from solved in both HTM and QTM metrics at the same time, for n=0...5.
 
The only change I would add to the FMC format is that the 80 moves limit should be lowered to 70. I would say even lower, like 60 or, but as a first moves drop it might sound too harsh.
The reason is that it will make life of organizers and delegates easier. It's not that easy to check a 70 moves solution...not to mention that the writing of the competitor might be awful sometimes. I think anyone can get a sub 60 solution with normal Fridrich.
 
I don't actually see a reason for a limit at all - if a competition wants to judge a 100+ move solution they should be allowed to, and if they want to make a cutoff of 60 or even lower they should be allowed to do that too.

The procedure for checking FMC solutions is not officially codified but it should ideally run something like this:
- Give the scramble to a specialized computer program.
- For each solution:
- - Go through the list of moves and type each one into the program. If you can't figure out one of the moves for certain, do your best to guess.
- - The program will tell you whether the solution is valid, and also the number of moves (HTM).
- - If the solution is not valid, sorry, it's DNF. Move on.
 
Changing to a 3-in-an-hour mean for FMC is like removing inspection for 2x2- it totally changes the approach people would have to take. You'd see a lot less inverse scrambling and less insertions, as both of these are rather time-consuming. And fyi both of my DNFs have been because I already had a 27 and didn't beat it/get sub30, so it wasn't worth writing down.
 
I would say keep 1h limit for FMC and add the possible format "Median of 3" to "Best of x", as I feel mean is too unforgiving and "Best of x" too luck-based and Avg5 impractical.
 
qqwref said:
I don't actually see a reason for a limit at all - if a competition wants to judge a 100+ move solution they should be allowed to, and if they want to make a cutoff of 60 or even lower they should be allowed to do that too.

The procedure for checking FMC solutions is not officially codified but it should ideally run something like this:
- Give the scramble to a specialized computer program.
- For each solution:
- - Go through the list of moves and type each one into the program. If you can't figure out one of the moves for certain, do your best to guess.
- - The program will tell you whether the solution is valid, and also the number of moves (HTM).
- - If the solution is not valid, sorry, it's DNF. Move on.
Click to expand...

But I think a default limit should be assumed, and it's up to the organizer to change it. Just like events have a 10 minute limit unless otherwise defined. That way if a competition does want to allow 100, they can. If they want to allow 800, then they must state that.

I like the idea of having the computer validate. But I would change one thing, "If you can't figure out one of the moves for certain, DNF" People should write clearly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

AK51
The possibility of solving a 3x3 Rubik's Cube under 2 seconds - Optimizing block building
Replies
1
Views
228
abunickabhi
abunickabhi
AK51
The possibility of solving a 3x3 Rubik's Cube under 2 seconds - Optimizing block building
Replies
0
Views
210
AK51
AK51
jazzthief81
The worst possible cross scrambles
Replies
2
Views
559
jazzthief81
jazzthief81
0rcoraCuber21
Worst Solve Possible Game
Replies
19
Views
2,153
BenChristman1
BenChristman1
FenTheGoat
100,000 3x3 solves (possibly wr?)
2 3
Replies
48
Views
3,757
FenTheGoat
FenTheGoat
Back
Top