it could be extremely easy for competitors to be given 2 different pin states (all pins up, or all pins down) on the same face.
This… already happens with current scrambling regulations, though? There's no requirement for scrambling to start on a specific face.
My point is, in my proposal,
there is no option to which face is laid down flat once scrambling is done. The scramble ends in one side with the pins down (namely, the face that you start scrambling with, whichever face that happens to be); that face is the one that rests against the table. The other choice would obviously lead to all the pins being toggled, as you note, which is undesirable.
It also opens up a significant avenue for cheating by “accidentally” transporting the puzzle in a way that pushes all pins to one side
If there is this little faith in the scramblers/runners/judges at competitions, maybe the WCA should just not even approve competitions in those areas until trustworthy people show up.
Scramble orientation in the blindsolving events has the same issue—we expect puzzles to be delivered to the competitor in a randomised orientation, but how would you know if the runner secretly biases a few cubes here and there to the competitor's preferred orientation, especially without video evidence? (And if we do allow video evidence for blindsolving, why not clock as well? You can weed out runners who frequently deliver puzzles in the wrong state.)
Any cheating of this form would require collusion between at least two people (the competitor and the scrambler or runner), and any scheme involving more than one person runs the risk of being divulged. (Not necessarily immediately, but perhaps if someone decides they can't live with their guilty conscience and eventually confesses.) I don't see your alleged "significant avenue for cheating" as an actual relevant concern.
competitors having the puzzle arrive with differing pin states is not something that should be allowed.
I agree with this in principle, but I also have multiple conflicting principles.
0. Pin state is part of puzzle state.
(I don't know why this is remotely controversial.)
1. (Assuming 0.) Pin state should be randomised in the scramble.
2. (Assuming 0.) Pin movement should not be allowed during inspection.
These are what we currently have, and in an ideal world that would be perfect, but in our less-than-ideal world, we get all the problems laid out earlier in the thread that make clock a difficult event to run. If I had to choose one of these to drop, I'd rather drop 1 (leading to my earlier proposal of delivering the puzzle flat) than drop 2 / drop 1&2 (OP proposal of allowing inspection pin movement), because having the puzzle always delivered with all pins up leads to a smaller difference from current results compared to allowing competitors to adjust pins during inspection.
As in the new 4g2 (which I was not aware was basically finalised), pin state accidentally changing will no longer warrant an extra scramble. As long as accidental pin state changes aren't biased in a specific way, competitors are ultimately still going to receive fair scrambles—just possibly not the exact same ones as their fellow competitors at the same competition, in the same round, in the same group.
