It seems that twisting a corner is the hottest topic here. The issue here is that we need a fair and consistently enforceable rule.
If a competitor can end up with a single twisted corner for OLL, there are always going to be ambiguous cases where it's unclear if the competitor was at fault. I believe the best we can say is that twisting a single corner is allowed, *for fixing parity* only.
Now, we need to figure out the best way to make this as fair as possible in all situations, without allowing abuse.
If we allow competitors an extra attempt for a corner twist during scrambling, competitors could try to abuse it if they had a bad solve with a (questionably) unintentional corner twist.
If we don't extra attempts at the discretion of the judge / Delegate, then competitors might have unfair treatement, because of who judged them and how.
If we never allow them, then that's unfair to the competitors who get them, who have to deal with an unexpected issue.
In any case, I don't think we can should competitors for using loose cubes, and we *definitely* cannot allow delegates to give inconsistent rulings (yes, I'm looking at you, Dene).
Here's my suggestion:
- Leave Regulation 5b3c as it is.
- Consider adding a Guideline instructing scramblers to check the top and bottom stickers of the corners, especially if they suspect a twist.
- Don't award extra attempts for unexpected twisted corners.
If you'd like to have further discussion (which is welcome), could we take it to a separate thread?
Alright. I've tried to select all the remaining posts worth responding to:
10e3) If one move is required, the puzzle shall be considered solved with a time penalty (+2 seconds).
Indeed. We are *not* removing +2 penalties for misalignment in this revision. Please don't discuss it further.
What if someone gets a 59:59 6/6 +2 in multibld, is it 1:00:01?
Yes. See the
corresponding Guidelinesp/url].
Challenge accepted!
[url]http://www.stefan-pochmann.info/diff.html
Wow that took me way too long.
Want another challenge? Match up the Regulations and Guidelines by numbering.
3d1) Exception: Competitors with a medically documented visual disability may use textured puzzles with different textures on different faces. Textures/patterns must be uniform per face. Each face should have a distinct colours, to aid in scrambling and judging.
This should probably be clarified to exclude blindfold solving. I know blind people are unlikely to be competing in BLD, just seems like something that should be mentioned.
Has this ever happened? The most appropriate solution here is probably to have two cubes, a textured one for memo and an untextured one for execution. This is such a rare case that the Delegate should be able to handle it; I'm strongly in favor of avoiding contigency rules that are unlikely to happen at all.
If this ever becomes important to clarify, we can add a Guideline.
PLEASE CHANGE THE WORDING IN THE REGULATIONS. This definition of block turn metric is just totally wrong with what it has commonly meant. Moving two inner layers together on a 4x4x4, for example, is considered one block turn. I don't think that is what the definition in the regulations is trying to convey. It's very badly worded in the first place, so I'm not even clear what it's supposed to mean. Please don't try to make "block turn" mean something different from what it commonly means today. A block turn means moving any "block of layers" together, and a face layer does not need to be one of the layers.
Well, at least Dan Hoey used the terms quarter-twist metric and half-twist metric in the old "cube lovers" archives. He clearly defined it for 3x3x3 cube
here and "qtw" for 4x4x4
here. (Hoey used a fixed DLB model for 4x4x4 in his post to avoid rotated versions of the same cube position, but clearly it is a equivalent to allowing single- or double-layer turns on 6 faces.) Reid's optimal solver source also refers to face turns (3x3x3) as twists, as do a lot of posts in the old cube lovers archives, it seems to me.
It seems more commonly these days, when a face layer must be included, it's called "face-turn metric." This is consistent with the term as used on the 3x3x3, and simply turning face layers is not sufficient on larger cubes, so the extension of "face-turn metric" in this way seems rather logical.
Hm, I always thought this is what BTM meant, and what you says is BTM was some sort of contiguous block turn metric. I don't like FTM, because it loses the concepctual emphasis of "block" instead of "face". I can see this becoming confusing to beginners. FTM is also associated a lot with 3x3x3, and I don't really consider "Rw" a face turn. It might work, but I think it just doesn't "fit".
How do we encapsulate "grab as much as you wnat from one side of the cube, and turn it all together"?
Outer Block Turn Metric? (OBTM?) I wanted to use an existing term.
I was hoping to use BTM as an established, simple way to describe this. I want the Regulations to call it *something*, else people have to refer to the "old" WCA metric/notation vs. the "new" specification, and things will only get worse if we ever amend things again.
(This whole thing is why I wanted to solidfy existing notation / metric standards in a separate project a few years ago, but that never happened. I'm also really sad that the WCA adopted SiGN-contradicting notation right when we made SiGN.)
I'm inclined to go with Stefan's suggestion, and just define metric for 3x3x3.
I'm just against calling it "half turn metric", because "half turn" is a historical way to describe it, not an intuitive one. And it doesn't make slice moves clear.
Perhaps FTM is our only option. Any other brilliant ideas?
I think this could be fixed with a mandatory rule that you have to have a fixed judge at each timer or a rule where delegates choose people to judge who are experienced enough. The downside is that this would obviously cause some efficiency issues, so another solution is to say anyone can judge if they read some short instructions on judging that specify all the penalties that a judge needs to be able to make.
It's generally not good to mandate these aspects of how a competition should be run. If competition organizers didn't have the freedom to try different systems, we probably wouldn't have learned to be so efficient. And some competitions need more flexibity.
Anyone is welcome to make a good judging guide and promote its use to organizers.
F3) At the end of the inspection period, the competitor shall place the puzzle onto the mat in a standing position. He must not change the positions of any pins from their scrambled positions before the beginning of the solve. Penalty: time penalty (+2 seconds).
so if i change the state of a pin its a plus 2 and not a dnf?
Yes. Perhaps we clarify that we should only allow a +2 in the case where a clock fell over unintentionally. Anyone object to that?
Does anyone have any good examples of clocks falling over or competitors changing pins by accident?
Someone else's comment reminded me, though, that it might be good to separate the sections, so that the standing clock is mandatory and the pin changes have a time penalty.
In case anybody is interested, here are my notes that I took while looking at this set of regulations.
Noted.
Is there a reason that there is not Article 6?
All of it was optional, so it's been
moved to the Guidelines. We don't want old references to Regulations to become invaled, so the other articles keep their number, leaving a gap.
