Should Duplicates at MBLD event in WCA comps be given a penalty for the organizer or delegate?

[abunickabhi]

I perceive multi to be a super delicate event.

A simple thing like duplicate scramble can offset the competitor.

The only way to make sure these painful duplicates do not appear again in comps is to penalize the organizers so that they are serious about rechecking the scrambled cubes. The penalty can be monetary or a official warning about not being upto the mark.

It is easy to grant an extra attempt to excuse the mistake of the scrambler, but the offset that competitor is not solved by just handing out an extra attempt which would take one FULL HOUR!

There is an easy practice that scramblers do to not have duplicates EVER.

 

[Mike Hughey]

It would help to give timestamps on Rowe's video. I'm not sure how many times he talks about duplicates in the video yet - just starting to watch (really interesting, fascinating video from Rowe!!!), but I can see he first mentions a duplicate at 14:48.

 

[Tabe]

I do think that multi is super delicate event. A simple thing like duplicate scramble can offset the competitor.

The only way to make sure these painful duplicates do not appear again in comps is to penalize the organizers so that they are serious about rechecking the scrambled cubes. The penalty can be monetary or a official warning about not being upto the mark.

It is easy to grant an extra attempt to excuse the mistake of the scrambler, but the offset that competitor is not solved by just handing out an extra attempt which would take one FULL HOUR!

There is an easy practice that scramblers do to not have duplicates EVER.

Organizers aren't in charge of scrambles. Delegates are. Delegates also don't get paid. Monetary penalties against unpaid volunteers is a RIDICULOUSLY terrible idea. Want to lose delegates or never have MBLD held again? Implement this idea.

 

[abunickabhi]

Organizers aren't in charge of scrambles. Delegates are. Delegates also don't get paid. Monetary penalties against unpaid volunteers is a RIDICULOUSLY terrible idea. Want to lose delegates or never have MBLD held again? Implement this idea.

Yes it is impractical to penalise.

I like Rowe's solution on the WCA forum. Have only one person do the scrambling.

Have a delegate overlook the scrambled cubes. Do not penalise as mistakes would be less if this is ensured.

 

[Mike Hughey]

With regard to the method described by Aneurin Hunt (thetx789) above, there is one problem with the method that keeps it from being foolproof, since we do the reorientation as part of the scramble. You could accidentally change the orientation of one of the cubes before putting it down, or allow one to slip or move, and then think that you have no duplicate when in fact you do have a duplicate.

 

[abunickabhi]

With regard to the method described by Aneurin Hunt (thetx789) above, there is one problem with the method that keeps it from being foolproof, since we do the reorientation as part of the scramble. You could accidentally change the orientation of one of the cubes before putting it down, or allow one to slip or move, and then think that you have no duplicate when in fact you do have a duplicate.

The center color of the top layer would also be verified when the delegate is checking for duplicates.

Going in batches of 7, if he sees a different center color on top, he should change orientation and recheck. In rare cases, there might be duplicates in different orientation.

 

[randomspeedcuber2023]

Organizers aren't in charge of scrambles. Delegates are. Delegates also don't get paid. Monetary penalties against unpaid volunteers is a RIDICULOUSLY terrible idea. Want to lose delegates or never have MBLD held again? Implement this idea.

mbld sucks, implement this idea

 

[artless1der]

I do think that multi is super delicate event. A simple thing like duplicate scramble can offset the competitor.

The only way to make sure these painful duplicates do not appear again in comps is to penalize the organizers so that they are serious about rechecking the scrambled cubes. The penalty can be monetary or a official warning about not being upto the mark.

It is easy to grant an extra attempt to excuse the mistake of the scrambler, but the offset that competitor is not solved by just handing out an extra attempt which would take one FULL HOUR!

There is an easy practice that scramblers do to not have duplicates EVER.

Does cstimer make scrambles based on TNoodle?
And if so, does cstimer have MBLD amongst all the other handy cubing tools I've heard reported a hundred times?

That would seem a simple solution, and easy enough for just one person to handle in doing the scrambling as previously posted...

If the answers to the above questions are negatory, perhaps @FilipeTeixeira and/or some equally genius programmer could write a orogram + GUI that provides discrete MBLD scrambles for each event instance while keeping a database of which have already been used bwfore so only new not-previously-used-in-the-cubiverse scrambles are projected... mtc

 

[xyzzy]

while keeping a database of which have already been used bwfore so only new not-previously-used-in-the-cubiverse scrambles are projected...

A scrambling program is not supposed to do that. It should be possible, albeit very rare, for duplicate scrambles to legitimately be produced. This is practically never going to happen for 3×3×3 because of how large the state space is, but hypothetically, you'd start seeing duplicate scrambles for 2×2×2, skewb, and pyraminx after a few thousand scrambles.

(In fact, it would not surprise me if there already are competitions with duplicate scrambles for those three events, if we include duplicates across different rounds and groups but still within the same comp. I think someone's looked into this before?)

The problem being discussed here is that the human scrambler is reading off the scramble sequences from the scramble sheet in the wrong order, causing multiple cubes to be scrambled with the same scramble sequence. It's a human issue, not a software issue (except insofar as readability of the scramble sheets could maybe be improved).

 

[artless1der]

nice to see Rowe uploaded a new video about how to do MBLD scrambles

 

[abunickabhi]

This is a solid way of scrambling. It is good that Rowe made it clear.