Spencer131
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What is the point of having a move that does nothing in the scramble?
Why do clock scrambles have 0+?
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Skewby_Doo
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My guess is that it is a program that makes a 0-6 positive or negative number, and it just happens to have 0. Not sure why though, good point.
An Animating Cuber
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Probably just for consistency in scramble's
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I find that it is much easier to apply scrambles this way - less likelihood of making a mistake. The consistency means you are much less likely to apply a turn to the wrong dial or pin setting.
Lucas Garron
Premium Member
Back in 2012 when we adopted the new clock notation, we were replacing this (what qqTimer calls "Jaap order"):
In https://github.com/thewca/tnoodle/issues/35 , you can see were were concerned about consistent layout for the scrambles. An early draft in that thread looked like this:
So, we don't have an exact documented reason for keeping 0 moves, but you can see that it came from making sure the scrambles are easy to follow and predictably formatted.
In particular, clock scrambles have always come from a fixed pin order. The "new" notation is meant to be very accessible to beginners (e.g. people at competitions who are scrambling because they're not competing in it), who can get used to the pin order over time. In fact, once you *do* get used to the pin order, you can just read the numbers and ignore the letters. However, your internalized pin order can get out of sync with the scramble if you just look at the numbers and the `0` moves are omitted, like @Mike Hughey says. (Note that a scramble contains 14 independent choices of 12 hour amounts each, so on average about 1 of these choices will be 0.)
From work in in browser security UX, I know research has shown that people will notice a "negative" signal more than the absence of a "positive" signal. In a similar way, a `_0+` move is an in-band negative signal ("there is no move here") that allows scrambles to use the same 15 move families in the same order every time without having to read the parts that are always the same.
In https://github.com/thewca/tnoodle/issues/35 , you can see were were concerned about consistent layout for the scrambles. An early draft in that thread looked like this:
So, we don't have an exact documented reason for keeping 0 moves, but you can see that it came from making sure the scrambles are easy to follow and predictably formatted.
In particular, clock scrambles have always come from a fixed pin order. The "new" notation is meant to be very accessible to beginners (e.g. people at competitions who are scrambling because they're not competing in it), who can get used to the pin order over time. In fact, once you *do* get used to the pin order, you can just read the numbers and ignore the letters. However, your internalized pin order can get out of sync with the scramble if you just look at the numbers and the `0` moves are omitted, like @Mike Hughey says. (Note that a scramble contains 14 independent choices of 12 hour amounts each, so on average about 1 of these choices will be 0.)
From work in in browser security UX, I know research has shown that people will notice a "negative" signal more than the absence of a "positive" signal. In a similar way, a `_0+` move is an in-band negative signal ("there is no move here") that allows scrambles to use the same 15 move families in the same order every time without having to read the parts that are always the same.
Spencer131
Veteran
I never imaged there would be this much depth in a decision like that, but it all makes sense when you explain it that way!
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