Random Blindfold Cubing Discussion

I thought I would bring this up here, I just noticed it (I am not sure if it has been mentioned before)

The top 100 solves for multi blind are all 3 cubes! And, all 3 cubes are in the top 100!
 
Chris - would it be too strange to come up with something real but on the wrong scale? You could have a journey, say, through a toilet and into the sewers as a mouse-sized man.
 
Hi everyone,

I need more journeys for big cube BLD memo.
Think with your stomache. Do you like to eat in food courts/buffets? Is there a restaurant who's menu you can already recite by heart?

Your favourite food-court (Sydneysiders will know where this one is)
Ginseng Chicken place
Fried porkchop place
Place that does spaghetti
Happy Chef Laksa
Questionable Stir-fry place
Awesome Cantonese BBQ Place
Crappy Japanese place
Vietnamese Pho place
...

Your favourite buffet restaurant (think of the locations of the food, rather than the food)
Bread
Steamed veges
Mashed potatoes
Roast Beef
Roast Ham
Gravy
....


The meats section and/or deli counter of your local supermarket
- Cheese
- Coleslaw
- Tubs of salad
...
- fried chicken
- fried fish
....
- Lamb Chops
- Pork chops
- pork sausages

Remember the location rather than the object.

Pub crawl in your local town? I think that's an awesome excuse. "Why were you out drinking until 4am?" "I had to memo all the pubs for locations my multi-bld attempt *hic*"
 
Oh! and chris, with the question about new paths... I really like the idea about video games, I am not sure if you are a hardcore COD gamer... :P Lets see what else:

A walk through a grocery store perhaps going down each aisle, with a obvious difference between the refrigerated sections, bakery sections, etc.

Thats probably all I can contribute really, not much of an idea. Ill let you know once I switch from linked lists to journey. I have always thought it might be fun to do this:

Take a path you know kinda well, and then make yourself TINY

You can then walk through that path, and have much more obvious land marks, like for my house, I would instantly notice my hamper as I walk out of my room, a soda can next to the door, a hole in the wall where there is a cat door, etc.

I am not sure if that would work, as again I have not tried journey, but it would be interesting to hear about this ;)

On top of paths, this could open up things like going through a back pack, etc, walking through the bags and zippers and stuff. I would imagine it would be easy to imagine walking through an object (Obviously, though, not one that is too similar to an image :P) that is very familiar to you. I could easily walk through say, A lamp. It would be fairly easy to start at the base of the lamp head, walk up to the light bulb, go to the top of the lamp head, go up the arm, walk to the wire, down the arm, down the wire, up the springs etc.

I am interested to hear if this works, or if this has already been suggested, or if it doesnt work :P
 
It has been mentioned in several threads that the sticker less Guhong cannot be used in competitions.
But thinking about BLD, shouldn’t sticker less cubes be considered the ideal (from an organizers standpoint) BLD cubes?

Having no stickers means there will be no differences in surface texture / feel.
On most of my cubes the stickers wear in an uneven way so theoretically I could try to identify pieces by touch.
I know the yellow center sticker on my main F-II has a very typical feel.

Another thing on cubes / stickers:
In MultiBLD, how much difference is allowed between the cubes you are using?
I am not sure if using different cubes would actually make a difference vs using 100% identical cubes but still…
Can I use an F-II – Guhong – FII combo?
Can an organizer expect a competitor to have identical cubes? What about the 10+ multi BLD guys?
 
No, that's absolutely ridiculous.
That's what I thought but there is no specific info in the WCA regulation at all.

Only in the regular BLD rules there is a reference to the pieces on a puzzle having to be identical:
•B1d) Solving phase must be done on a puzzle with tiles, stickers or paint, without different textures or markings.
 
Right now, the WCA regulations don't spell things out very well, but don't seem to require identical cubes. In competitions I've been to, there has never been a requirement that the cubes be identical. All of my attempts have included some tiled cubes and some stickered cubes. The truth is, I'd actually prefer to have all of my cubes identical, but I haven't been willing to spend the time making them the same, and besides, I like having some tiled cubes and I don't want to make them all stickered. But I guess I would change them if the regulations were rewritten to require this. (I'd hate to throw away all those nice tiles, though.)

I use an A2 as one of my multi cubes; the truth is that I notice that cube specifically more than I notice the tiled vs. stickered cubes - I have it set very loose and it feels so different from the rest of them. Most of my multi cubes are actually storeboughts, and even though I've lubed them all, some of them are really bad.
 
Has anyone any experience with favorite movie journey/locations?

I have devised 2 rooms being scenes within films that have been favorites of mine for years. In test memos it seems having my memo interact with the scenes I know well seems to be very positive, possibly because I associate each location with an animate scene and have memo interact with that. I was wondering if anyone had much success or experience with this?
 
I know some people have already seen some debate about this, and I would like to continue that debate is this thread since it feels like a more "proper" place to discuss this.

I've been thinking a lot about synergistic pacing vs. GOGOGO pacing for 3x3x3.

By synergistic pacing I mean the following:
Go as quickly as possible. However, you must accept the feedback that your brain gives you. If you notice that your memorization is having a hard time sticking, then you must slow down however much it takes until you feel things being to "stick" in your memo again. Once things start to stick in your memo again begin speeding up back to as quickly as you possibly can, accepting any future feedback from your brain as necessary.

My interpretation of GOGOGO pacing is: Go as quickly as possible no matter what.

I did all five of my round 10 BLD race solves with synergistic pacing and got a best time of 1:26. However, my only two other successes using the same approach were sup-1:50. I did another solve just now as practice and got 1:13.69. What struck me on the 1:13 that I just did is how relaxed and "slow" the memo felt. I started out going noticeably slowly on corner memo using images (I could feel a bit of a "fog" from having done 5 solves in a row already). However, I noticed that the images were sticking fairly easily so I speed up drastically to finish corner memo at a very fast pace.

Going into edge memo (auditory loop) I started out going fairly quickly from the momentum of just having finished corner memo at breakneck pace. Immediately I noticed the words not sticking very well, so I dropped my pace by probably 40-50%. I memo'd almost to the end of edges at this pace, then sped up to maybe 75% of maximum speed for the last little bit of edges (keeping in mind that the last words would "echo" in my head without me having to do much work to hold onto them).

--------

I guess I would be more of a proponent of GOGOGO pacing if it was accompanied by a thorough post-mortem for every DNF solve. In the recently posted article on how to break past plateaus it states to try to go faster than your normal pace, but study why you fail when going at the faster pace. I may from time to time try GOGOGO pacing on 3x3x3 (not accepting the feedback from my brain, or not slowing down as much as I usually do when I receive this feedback), but I would certainly do thorough post-mortems on the DNFs when doing this.

Now, I'm sure this post is laughable to many of you reading. Clearly the GOGOGO solvers are much faster than I am on 3x3x3. Still though, the whole concept of GOGOGO pacing without doing a post-mortem on any DNFs just seems like an inefficient way to practice. This is my personal opinion of course, but the article on how to break past plateaus seems to back this up.

I'm not trying to offend anyone here, but I recently have been thinking a lot about this topic. Does anyone else think about this topic? Does anyone else have an opinion on this?
 
Has anyone any experience with favorite movie journey/locations?

I have devised 2 rooms being scenes within films that have been favorites of mine for years. In test memos it seems having my memo interact with the scenes I know well seems to be very positive, possibly because I associate each location with an animate scene and have memo interact with that. I was wondering if anyone had much success or experience with this?

I find that using locations from movies doesn't work particularly well for me, mainly because a lot of sets are somewhat 2-dimensional in the sense that you only see them from 1 or 2 different perspectives. I can't make my images as vivid when using those locations. I think locations in 3D video games would work nicely for me though.
 
@Chris: After seeing how you define synergistic and GOGOGO approach, I don't really know which I belong to. Yes I do try and go as fast as possible but I also play safe to some extent. I always review my edges memo at least once after finishing them (if you notice in my BLD vids sometimes you can see me putting down my cube and looking somewhere else for a few seconds, that's me reviewing my edge memo before proceeding to corners), and may repeat more if I don't feel that it sticks. Then again, I think I'm now at a level where I'm trying to improve my success rate rather than getting better times.

I think rather than focusing on what kind of approach you should go for in 3x3 single BLD, it's better to focus on what goals you wanna achieve. Always aim to break your PBs every time you practise, and only be satisfied with times close enough to your PBs. Taking Chris for example, if I've had one or two sub-60 solves before, I would not be even slightly happy about getting a 1:20+ solve and I would probably always go for sub 1:15 times or something like that. It seems like having the attitude of an impatient kid who can't wait to get faster would actually help. Back when I was at sup-1:20 average to when I was about low 50s, my main goal was always to beat my best average of 5, because I always felt like it would be easy to beat, and I improved pretty quickly.

These days though I would focus more on higher success rates probably because I feel my PB avg5 is very hard to beat. I'm gonna try the GOGOGO pace (as Chris defines it) later and aim to beat my PBs to see if it makes a difference. Also, when I'm on a GOGOGO pace I seldom try and do hard scrambles or those where I screwed up memo, because I know it would be a bad time anyway so I don't give a damn.
 
So I tried to do GOGOGO BLD (basically what I did differently was to not review my edges memo), after 4-5 DNFs and a 52s solve with bad recall I gave up. I guess 100% GOGOGO is a bad idea, it's surprising how much better the solve can be by just reviewing the letters once or twice.

Say there are two extremes: playing super safe and 100% GOGOGO (and I would think synergistic is somewhere around 70%), I would say being at about 80-90% would be a good place to continue improving without sacrificing too much of your success rate and reducing frustration.
 
Has anyone any experience with favorite movie journey/locations?

I have devised 2 rooms being scenes within films that have been favorites of mine for years. In test memos it seems having my memo interact with the scenes I know well seems to be very positive, possibly because I associate each location with an animate scene and have memo interact with that. I was wondering if anyone had much success or experience with this?

Ooh, I've got to try this. My favourite movie is Apocalyspe Now!. If you've not seen it, the whole thing is basically a journey upriver, with memorable scenes / stopping points.
The Hotel room in Saigon, General's Headquaters, Playboy bunnies, The Do-long bridge etc.

I think there would be limited use in a movie where sets/locations are re-used. But any movie with a "journey" could be very good.
 
Question for you guys. When you talk about "review" of a memo, what do you mean and what do you do?
A) Picking the cube up and going over all the pieces again to make sure you've done it correctly.
B) Going through your memo (your sentences/images or whatever) once, twice or more?

I still completely suck, for me, I don't do A) Unless I'm doing a multi. If I do it on a single and find I've done it wrong, I tend to rage-quit.
I tend to do B) Heaps of times, over and over.

So what do you guys do? And do you do it any different for single/multi/big-cubes?
 
Question for you guys. When you talk about "review" of a memo, what do you mean and what do you do?
A) Picking the cube up and going over all the pieces again to make sure you've done it correctly.
B) Going through your memo (your sentences/images or whatever) once, twice or more?

I still completely suck, for me, I don't do A) Unless I'm doing a multi. If I do it on a single and find I've done it wrong, I tend to rage-quit.
I tend to do B) Heaps of times, over and over.

So what do you guys do? And do you do it any different for single/multi/big-cubes?

For 3BLD, I do a bit of both.
I memorise the edges then rehearse the memo while memorising the corners visually, I need to go over the corner pieces many times.

For multi I used to go over every single piece twice to make sure it was right the first time around, but I didn't like how it slowed me down - so I stopped doing this and resorted to just rehearsing the memo.

I approach 4 and 5BLD like multi, just go over the actual pieces once and hope they were memorised correctly.

There is an alternative to A and B, which is extremely fast if you get good at it. This is one pass memo, where you memo everything in one go and don't stop to rehearse.
 
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I don't do A) Unless I'm doing a multi. If I do it on a single and find I've done it wrong, I tend to rage-quit.

Same here. I would only do A) if something doesn't feel right, and most of the time I give up anyway unless I'm trying to do an average or something.

Usually it's just repeating my edge memo once or twice if it's hard to remember
 
Question for you guys. When you talk about "review" of a memo, what do you mean and what do you do?
A) Picking the cube up and going over all the pieces again to make sure you've done it correctly.
B) Going through your memo (your sentences/images or whatever) once, twice or more?

I still completely suck, for me, I don't do A) Unless I'm doing a multi. If I do it on a single and find I've done it wrong, I tend to rage-quit.
I tend to do B) Heaps of times, over and over.

So what do you guys do? And do you do it any different for single/multi/big-cubes?

I will put it in my own word, what I understand you said is:
A) to verify that the right thing was memorized
B) to recall what was memorized (rehearsal)

I can only talk about multi. I always do A) once after memorization of a cube. This is a new thing in my methodology and my accuracy improved. As Zane said, this is time consuming. So this is the pro and con of it.
 
So I tried to do GOGOGO BLD (basically what I did differently was to not review my edges memo), after 4-5 DNFs and a 52s solve with bad recall I gave up. I guess 100% GOGOGO is a bad idea, it's surprising how much better the solve can be by just reviewing the letters once or twice.

Say there are two extremes: playing super safe and 100% GOGOGO (and I would think synergistic is somewhere around 70%), I would say being at about 80-90% would be a good place to continue improving without sacrificing too much of your success rate and reducing frustration.

I like this, the way you put it is very descriptive and very helpful.

As you accurately put it, my synergistic pacing probably averaged out to about 70-75% maximum speed with the slow parts and fast parts of memo both taken into account. I just tried a 5BLD solve from the 5x5x5 speedsolve scrambles using synergistic pacing, but trying to go a bit further along the spectrum towards GOGOGO. This solve was probably at 75-80% maximum speed when you average out the slow and fast parts of memo. I rarely look at the timer at the end of memo. To me the memo time is irrelevant and distracting information during the solve. However, the overall solve time was 10:49.75, which is pretty fast for me. Anything sub-11 is really a very good solve at my level. Considering my solving phase is probably pretty consistent around 4:45-5:45 (it was 4:51 on my 12:59 NAR solve) depending on whether I have recall delays or not then I probably memorized for this solve in 5:35ish, which is quite fast for me.

Amos, can you suggest a better name for GOGOGO pace as you use it? I'm with Macky on this (if I interpret his last post correctly) in that we should make GOGOGO a technical term with a more precise definition. If GOGOGO is 100% speed, then what would you call your 80-90% GOGOGO pace? Or should GOGOGO be defined as 80-90% maximum speed?

Because of my synergistic approach I will probably always be on the lower end of the 80-90% closer to 80%, but I do see what you mean now that this can lead to faster times without sacrificing too much in the way of accuracy. I just feel that we need more precise terms for these various pacing methods used. Also, perhaps these should be added to the Wiki. As mental as BLD is, the pacing method used should be considered part of the BLD method in my eyes. Would you agree?
 
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