Towards "Anything Goes" (WCA Puzzle Policy)

[Dene]

A transparent cube is still a Rubik's cube. It are still 20 pieces with a marking on it which you have to puzzle together.

But is it? I'm not sure everyone would agree (I don't).

 

[Lucas Garron]

First of all: now I understand Sarah's post even less.

I'm sorry if you felt attacked. My post was actually a compliment about the open-mindedness to concider a drastic change in the direction the Board/WRC is going (of which there were barely any signs before)... No I did not imply the Board/WRC was ignorant, but yes I do think the policy was horrible and yes of course I would like to help to stay constructive as I have been.

I suppose I would say we considered. But in our discretion, we went for the more specific approach.

I also wouldn't say the current policy is horrible. Apart from the 1mm Megaminx thing, I have yet to hear of a case where a competitor was seriously affected (i.e. had to give up one of their strongly preferred puzzle for a much less satisfactory alternative).

A number of cubers did start working on more than "giving 2 cents". Like I said we were working a proposal ourselves. This simply takes a lot of time. We really needed to have the support of a lot of cubers since a proposal from just myself would probably be thrown in the bin without much comment.

That's great to hear!

I wasn't aware of it, though. Sorry if it was in this thread and I missed it.

In any case, any serious proposal (including exact wording changes) sent to the WRC *will* be placed on GitHub. I haven't seen any more than small suggested fixes for particular Regs. Please let me know if you'd like the WRC to be aware of a work in progress.

Also, I know at least 2 people applied to be part of the WRC and help you guys out. So please refrain from making false statements that nobody did anything.

I told them both that they can do just as much good towards solving this problem whether they're not on the WRC, and they seemed to concur when I told them.
Being on the WRC doesn't mean you get magical powers in being able to figure out how to change the Regulations.
I almost want to say that if not being on the WRC stops them from trying to help create a solution, they shouldn't be on the WRC. Working on something like this would be great evidence that they would be productive on the WRC.

(Kit Clement is a great example of someone who's not on the WRC, but cares enough to take some action and give in

If they'd like to be on the WRC to have some position of authority, or because they care about the upkeep of the entire Regulations as much as discussing the current major issues, I'm always happy to consider it.
(It would really be best to have a process for WRC appointments. I'd also like it to be more of a community-supported thing. But we don't really have time for all that at the moment.)

On a side note: maybe your expectations of the form of the input the community should give you are just different. I think it's quite clear which direction the community wanted to go. Is it really our responsibility to provide the exact changes of all regulations? That'd be like politicians expecting the citizens to come up with law-changes, although the question they should be asking is "what do you want?". (yes this is more about the discussions there were after publishing the 2014 regulations)

I do understand. However, for lawmakers this is a paid full-time job.

As for "what the community wanted", everyone just wants their favorite puzzle. Someone wants stickerless and doesn't care about pillowed. Someone wants pillowed, but doesn't and thinks stickerless shouldn't be allowed.
Okay, maybe not exactly that, but it's very hard to judge community interest based on vocal folks on speedsolving.com. And sometimes the right thing isn't about popularity.
I think our only real mistake was having too many of the discussions too close to the Regulations changes. This was because everyone is a volunteer with limited time. I think we can learn from that, but we have the current topics on hand.

Also, this is the second thread about "what do you want?" Do you have suggestions for something else?[/QUOTE]

As you wanted some suggestions on the plastic:
There are roughly 2 options you can go with. Either just allow everything (inlcuding transparent cubes, fangshi's and maybe even pieces recognizable with touch), or you have to make some form of restriction. Personally I don't see what would be the problem in just allowing anything (after all everyone has the same 'rights' of puzzle-usage), but I guess you still want to draw some lines. I think the "Border-Case Puzzle Brainstorm thread" is a great way to find out which forms we agree are ok and which are not. After we agree on that, we can analyse what restrictions are necessary to implement and think of ways how to implement it in the regulations. (I intentionally bolded "after" since I think it's kinda pointless to start throwing around regulation changes in this thread before we reach a rough consensus on what we actually want to do)

I actually agree, but I think many people don't. Some good arguments from oehter people would be useful here.

At the moment, I'm interested in trying to turn the current proposal into an accurate version of "anything goes". That means the wording needs to be changed to allow FangShis. (For several reasons, I would prefer not to do this myself.)

A transparent cube is still a Rubik's cube. It are still 20 pieces with a marking on it which you have to puzzle together.

I wish more people would actually be making arguments like that. I personally don't agree with it, but at least it's consistent with "I truly believe anything goes".

 

[LarsN]

Is this the wrong place for suggestions?

Suggestions:

- The design of the puzzle may not provide visual information other than the face colour. (exception: logo)

exhibit 3: gives information that the centerpiece is a centerpiece, but that information was already given by the centerpiece being in the center. So it would be allowed by above wording.
exhibit 4: no problem here

- The design of the puzzle may not provide information of piece postion or orientation through touch.

This is to prevent having elevated cross pieces or similar.

The wording may be flawed, but it's simple. It doesn't prevent clear plastic though.

 

[Erik]

I also wouldn't say the current policy is horrible. Apart from the 1mm Megaminx thing, I have yet to hear of a case where a competitor was seriously affected (i.e. had to give up one of their strongly preferred puzzle for a much less satisfactory alternative).

Of course this is just my opinion, let's discuss this on IRC or sth since it's getting off-topic here.

I told them both that they can do just as much good towards solving this problem whether they're not on the WRC, and they seemed to concur when I told them.
Being on the WRC doesn't mean you get magical powers in being able to figure out how to change the Regulations.
I almost want to say that if not being on the WRC stops them from trying to help create a solution, they shouldn't be on the WRC. Working on something like this would be great evidence that they would be productive on the WRC.

I know your reasoning, but I don't fully agree with it. Yes of course we can contribute by making proposals, but like I said, my proposal would probably be thrown in the bin without it being backed up by lots of other cubers. The one currently standing suddenly has support and attention since it didn't come from a random cuber. Also: I think both cubers who applied would actually be able to make some valuable contributions and provide some more info about the way competitions are run all over the world and provide some creative outside-the-box thinking.

I actually agree, but I think many people don't. Some good arguments from oehter people would be useful here.

At the moment, I'm interested in trying to turn the current proposal into an accurate version of "anything goes". That means the wording needs to be changed to allow FangShis. (For several reasons, I would prefer not to do this myself.)


I wish more people would actually be making arguments like that. I personally agree with it, but at least it's consistent with "I truly believe anything goes".

Great to see you are on board on this. Changing wording however is exactly what I think the WRC is responsible for though, but of course I welcome the request for input here as well.

As Dene showed, there are some differences in what cubers think is ok and not ok. I am a bit confused on what you want to achieve now. Do you:

1. want to work out the current proposal into a 'ready-to activate' version of the regulations? So only want to get suggestions on how to change the wording.
or
2. want to investigate what we think is ok and not ok?

 

[Lucas Garron]

Is this the wrong place for suggestions?

No, suggestions are great!

I like the idea of talking about the "face color". But it's hard to make this work for arbitrary puzzles without falling back to our old notion of "advantage".
Also, I think the consensus is that restricting *anything* that can be distinguished by feel is rather strict. For example, many competitors would probably prefer to use overlay stickers for sighted solves if they could, even though overlay stickers with just a little bit of wear may be easy to feel (and therefore a significant advantage in BLD).

I definitely like the idea of isolating what information may be provided by stickers/tiles/paint/plastic color, though.

 

[~Adam~]

It appears that wording a regulation simply and preventing clear cubes is tricky.

Do clear cubes need to be banned?
Should they be banned?

 

[LarsN]

Also, I think the consensus is that restricting *anything* that can be distinguished by feel is rather strict. For example, many competitors would probably prefer to use overlay stickers for sighted solves if they could, even though overlay stickers with just a little bit of wear may be easy to feel (and therefore a significant advantage in BLD).

You could distinguish between "design" and "wear and tear". That would allow used stickers that has some feel to it, but disallow puzzles with ridges on last layer cubies.

Which puzzles would suffer from not allowing feel that gives away position or orientation, not considering "wear and tear"?

 

[Lucas Garron]

I know your reasoning, but I don't fully agree with it. Yes of course we can contribute by making proposals, but like I said, my proposal would probably be thrown in the bin without it being backed up by lots of other cubers.

I suppose I will still disagree. It certainly won't be thrown on the bin. If your proposal has popular merit, starting a thread on speedsolving.com should be good enough to develop it. If you send something complete enough to the WRC, it will be just as official as Sébastien's proposal.

(As a first example that comes to mind, Noah Arthurs took the effort to make this happen for recognizing BLD means... and he had to work against a mountain of misunderstanding.)

1. want to work out the current proposal into a 'ready-to activate' version of the regulations? So only want to get suggestions on how to change the wording.
or
2. want to investigate what we think is ok and not ok?

For the purposes of this thread, I would like to have 1. That would mean we have a good starting point for considering "anything goes" that we can compare tot he current Regulations.

However, I think that such a proposal won't automatically be good enough to adopt. That's why I've started the brainstorming thread. It can help us evaluate the outcome of 1, as well as any particular changes to it.

 

[CubeRoots]

this makes me happy and gives me more faith in the WCA

 

[Logiqx]

Here's an idea for the mix - re: Two-tone Fangshi and stickerless cubes with stickers:

Look at each face of the solved puzzle. All pieces of a given type on a given face must be identical in shape, colour and texture. This applies to the plastic itself and stickers / tiles / paint.

With the above rule, I don't think the Cross / Line / F2B / F2L / LL / LSE pieces could be made easier to recognise with different plastics. Any attempts would violate the above rule.

The two-tone Fangshis would be allowable under this rule as would stickerless cubes (even with stickers applied).

A slightly more elaborate example... someone might like to have red centre pieces, white edge pieces and blue corner pieces. I believe this would be harmless as the colours would provide no additional information during the solve. The red / white / blue example doesn't violate the above rule but having some blue corners and some green corners would be prohibited as it might provide some advantage.

It might also be necessary to state that all sides of a puzzle be stickered / tiled / painted / ridged in the same way although the texture rule might cover that already.

 

[stoic]

It appears that wording a regulation simply and preventing clear cubes is tricky.

Do clear cubes need to be banned?
Should they be banned?

Should be easy enough to add a specific regulation banning them, eg:

-puzzles made using transparent material are not allowed

Here's an idea for the mix - re: Two-tone Fangshi and stickerless cubes with stickers:

Look at each face of the solved puzzle. All pieces of a given type on a given face must be identical in shape, colour and texture. This applies to the plastic itself and stickers / tiles / paint.

I was going to say that someone could have eg one tiled face and the rest stickered, until I saw you said this:

It might also be necessary to state that all sides of a puzzle be stickered / tiled / painted / ridged in the same way although the texture rule might cover that already.

Would you consider adding:
-All pieces of a given type on all faces must be identical in shape and texture.

 

[LarsN]

Would it be impossible to have a list of WCA approved puzzles? Just brainstorming ...

 

[Kirjava]

Would it be impossible to have a list of WCA approved puzzles? Just brainstorming ...

Using a whitelist would indeed be impossible.

 

[Sebastien]

Definitely not impossible, but not practical at all. A blacklist seems even less pratical to me.

 

[Kirjava]

Definitely not impossible, but not practical at all. A blacklist seems even less pratical to me.

Impossible to do without disallowing many perfectly valid puzzles.

 

[~Adam~]

If the regulations do change how long is it likely to take?
Not that I've bought 13 cubes to build 6 stickerless cubes in my colour scheme or anything like that.

 

[IRNjuggle28]

I also wouldn't say the current policy is horrible. Apart from the 1mm Megaminx thing, I have yet to hear of a case where a competitor was seriously affected (i.e. had to give up one of their strongly preferred puzzle for a much less satisfactory alternative).

No way. There are people who are into multi BLD that bought over a dozen stickerless cubes and can't use any of them. It's not that the a stickered cube is that much less satisfactory, but that's a lot of money thrown away.

 

[Logical101]

Definitely not impossible, but not practical at all. A blacklist seems even less pratical to me.

But the blacklist\Whitelist would act as a list of puzzles you can definitely can/can't use and if the cube is not on the list the regulations say if it is a usable cube

 

[Tim Major]

Yes that is the definition of a blacklist/whitelist.

 

[Logical101]

Yes that is the definition of a blacklist/whitelist.

Then why not?!?