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Unofficial: OLL Naming System; Bye Bye numbers!

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If you are anything like me you will find the system of using numbers to refer to OLL's extremely annoying and inconvenient. After over two years of cubing I still cannot link a case to a number and have to look up the OLL everytime I hear OLL-so-and-so. Numbers are very hard to link to images just like how in BLD letter pairs are harder to memorize. This is why people create words for their pairs. It makes it easy to visualize and relate things to one another.

This is why I think it would be a good idea if we name OLL's. This has been proposed before and the SS wiki even has names under all the OLL cases, but this has never really caught on and sometimes the names can be confusing. Here I propose a newer, easier naming system that I believe is good enough to gain traction. I also think that by actually implementing it into our vocabulary will encourage others to adopt it also until it overtakes the awful number system.

This document is not perfect. I am not satisfied with "Karen" or "Bunny". If you have any suggestions that you believe are better, please leave a comment on the document. This is very intuitive to learn and I want to make it even better by having words that can easily be linked to their respective cases. Some names describe the action of the OLL also. This includes "Sexysledge", "Spring", and others. Whenever the word "anti" is used this refers to a simple mirror of the pieces. I believe this has massive potential and will makes OLL referencing much easier.

 

BenChristman1

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I think that renaming OLLs is a great idea, but this definitely isn’t the way I’d go about doing it. I’d do it more along the lines of how @ruffleduck did ZBLL, using numbers and letters that represent the specific cases as opposed to your system that names every case based on the shapes the last layer color makes.
 

Lucas Garron

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If we're going to standardize a different OLL naming system that makes it easy to communicate, I think we should aim for something that can be learned / remembered in a few minutes instead of having 57 different names.

I made this a while back: https://github.com/lgarron/hash-oll
Hash OLL Naming.png
Why do people call the pi oll bruno? I've seen it before but nobody's ever explained it.
From Lars Petrus!

Sune caught on, Bruno and Niklas still stick around sometimes, and others have faded more into obscurity.
 
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I think that renaming OLLs is a great idea, but this definitely isn’t the way I’d go about doing it. I’d do it more along the lines of how @ruffleduck did ZBLL, using numbers and letters that represent the specific cases as opposed to your system that names every case based on the shapes the last layer color makes.
I don't really see a huge problem with having a word as an aide-mémoire. It is, in my opinion very intuitive. This is especially true when the words are simple and correlate to the arrangement or characteristics of the pieces.
There are names for certain categories of OLLs, you can find them here: https://bestsiteever.ru/oll/

I don't think they're entirely standardised but from experience most people know what I mean whenever I use these names... except for "awkward shape". That one should be Glider.
I think categories are definitely standardized but the problem comes when referring to specific OLL cases. Most people do not have all the numbers memorized for the respective OLL cases and I think that a name would be easier.
If we're going to standardize a different OLL naming system that makes it easy to communicate, I think we should aim for something that can be learned / remembered in a few minutes instead of having 57 different names.

I made this a while back: https://github.com/lgarron/hash-oll
View attachment 20306

From Lars Petrus!

Sune caught on, Bruno and Niklas still stick around sometimes, and others have faded more into obscurity.
This is very interesting and I thank you for sharing! I think anybody with the most basic knowledge of NBRS can easily understand this within five minutes. I suspect that this is better as you do not need to memorize a word for each case, you just need to know what it looks like!
 

MagicVince

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All those initiatives to make names more "intuitive" or "rational" are very interesting, in my opinion. Indeed the 57 OLL names make little sense for me, Even if I am sure there was an historical reason for numbering them that (I was asking for them in this thread some days ago). As a programmer, I like the idea of numbering the subparts like Lucas showed. But I think that the brain will rather recognize a yellow bar instead of a well oriented edge surrounded by 2 well oriented corners. I mean, in a hurry (and you are in a hurry when you solve a cube, right :)), you tend to generalize things rather than subdivide them. So my gut-feeling is that naming cases after their recognition pattern is the way to go. And some name and notions are very well established.
What is easier to understand ? OLL 45, #URL, Little-T or T+headlights? OLL 33, SexySledge, #TRL or T+bars?

By the way, regarding SexySledge, even if the name sounds great and you can understand easy what it means (as long as you understand the terms Sexy move and SledgeHammer move), generally speaking, I would avoid naming a case from the name of the algorithm that solve it. Would you call a Y-Perm a OLL37+33, whereas there are other ways to solve it? But indeed in this case (OLL 33, or whatever we want to call it) I am grant that we won't find any better algorithm ;).
 
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All those initiatives to make names more "intuitive" or "rational" are very interesting, in my opinion. Indeed the 57 OLL names make little sense for me, Even if I am sure there was an historical reason for numbering them that (I was asking for them in this thread some days ago).
The TIE-Fighter for OLL 57 is a reference to Star Wars but perhaps it is better to rename it as not everybody has the basic knowledge. (I am one of those with very basic knowledge myself.
As a programmer, I like the idea of numbering the subparts like Lucas showed. But I think that the brain will rather recognize a yellow bar instead of a well oriented edge surrounded by 2 well oriented corners. I mean, in a hurry (and you are in a hurry when you solve a cube, right :)), you tend to generalize things rather than subdivide them. So my gut-feeling is that naming cases after their recognition pattern is the way to go. And some name and notions are very well established.
What is easier to understand ? OLL 45, #URL, Little-T or T+headlights? OLL 33, SexySledge, #TRL or T+bars?
I'm not really sure what you are trying to say here. When you are doing a speedsolve you would simply look at the pattern of the LL pieces and do the appropriate algorithm to solve that case. This proposal is simply to make discussing OLL algorithms easier instead of having to look up the number each time you want to bring attention to a specific case. Of course, you could always memorize the numbers but they seem to be very random, unlike words where one can create a related image.
By the way, regarding SexySledge, even if the name sounds great and you can understand easy what it means (as long as you understand the terms Sexy move and SledgeHammer move), generally speaking, I would avoid naming a case from the name of the algorithm that solve it. Would you call a Y-Perm a OLL37+33, whereas there are other ways to solve it? But indeed in this case (OLL 33, or whatever we want to call it) I am grant that we won't find any better algorithm ;).
This is a good point and I was wary of naming OLL 33 sexysledge as there are alternative algorithms for this case that get use. The most common alternate algorithm is the one that turns what would be diagonal swap of PLL into an EPLL (this is what happened in Max Siauws 4.03 former-NR)

I suggest renaming the following
Anti-P --> b
Couch --> d
Anti-Couch --> q
I did consider that when I was documenting everything initially but I decided to forgo it as I thought most people already referred to #TBR and #TBL as Couch and Anti-Couch but if that is not the case then I would be more than happy to change it.
 

qwr

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If we're going to standardize a different OLL naming system that makes it easy to communicate, I think we should aim for something that can be learned / remembered in a few minutes instead of having 57 different names.

I made this a while back: https://github.com/lgarron/hash-oll
View attachment 20306

From Lars Petrus!

Sune caught on, Bruno and Niklas still stick around sometimes, and others have faded more into obscurity.
I like the concept but I think assigning one letter to edge orientation would make the names a lot easier to distinguish and recognize, even if more arbitrary like the PLLs.
 

GodCubing

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I did consider that when I was documenting everything initially but I decided to forgo it as I thought most people already referred to #TBR and #TBL as Couch and Anti-Couch but if that is not the case then I would be more than happy to change it.
I had no idea, but I never got that far with OLL. I knew it for a couple months before switching to roux
Also @Lucas Garron's system is probably best imo
 
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