I received an email responding to my last post (the one in which I declared this a blog for the mediocre!). I explained at the end of that post that, yes, clichéd as it is, the best advice for learning complicated algorithms is practice, practice, practice. The email asked how I practice. The short story is algorithm-by-algorithm, perm-by-perm. I just learned the Ra PLL, for example: (R U2 R) D (R’ U R) D’ (R’ U’) (R’ U R U R’). It was among the harder perms I’ve learned, and I’m not fast at it — between 3 and 4.5 seconds. So, I just drill over and over and over. Do it, reset, do it again. Here’s a quick video showing it:
Yes, that’s a just-purchased off-brand Stackmat timer connected to CCT on my work PC. “Shanty” form Bright Light Social Hour’s brilliant self-titled album is barely audible in the background.
UPDATE: This alg sucks. I long ago migrated to a totally different version, which is (odd as it may sound) my favorite alg.
After a brief hitaus from learning new algorithms, I posted over the weekend about learning Y Perm (and its two constituent OLLs). Feeling emboldened, I ventured into V Perm this week. According to smart people, 1/18 of solves should see a V Perm. Maybe something about my F2L technique puts a thumb on the V Perm scale, but I feel like I see it at least every 6 or 7 solves.
In any event, I learned it. It was hard. About as hard as I expected. And I’m still slow at it. But it works. Here’s a quickie video showing me clunk through it:
Over the past week, I’ve spent a little more time than usual on youtube. There’s a lot of good stuff out there, but even more junk. Of all the videos/channels I’ve visited, I’ve been most impressed with CrazyBadCuber‘s. In particular, I found this 3×3 walk-through video to be enormously helpful (especially for F2L look-ahead/tracking):
As someone averaging around 45 seconds with a personal best of 34, this narrated play-by-play helped me identify all sorts of inefficiencies in my current technique — and encouraged me to slow down and practice better techniques.
P.S. Notice the new domain? No more “.wordpress.” in there. For a mere $18/year, I figured it was time to (pretend to) do this for real….
As I earlier posted, I’ve been learning OLLs and PLLs at a moderate pace, trying to move past the inefficiencies of the Beginner’s Method. About half-way through learning A Perm, a light bulb went off: It corner cycles the same way as the penultimate Beginner’s Method algorithm of R’ F R’ B2 R F’ R’ B2 R2 — with Aa as the far less re-grippy surrogate, and Ab (its mirror) more efficient than serial application of the Beginner’s Method algorithm. (Slowly, it’s all coming together….)
I find the A Perm one of the easier cases to recognize, with its characteristic 2x2x1 block in a top-layer corner, the block having matching colors on either side. I set up by AUF‘ing the 2x2x1 block into the front-left corner, with the 2×2 block matching the middle and bottom layers (as in the diagram to the right). If the headlights (green-xx-green in the below diagrams) are in the back, you do the Aa Perm; if the headlights are to the right, you do the Ab Perm.
Over the past couple months, I’ve tried to exorcise all remnants of the Beginner’s Method. F2L replaced the corner-first/edge-next approach a while ago, and several OLLs have made top-layer orientation a (generally) single-algorithm affair. But my PLLs were still a bit all over the place. I got to the two-look stage pretty easily (with no illusions about being able to one-look it for a while still), but realized that I was still using the Beginner’s Method algorithm for edge cycling — to wit, F2 U(’) R’ L F2 R L’ U(’) F2. Although I got freakishly quick at that algorithm, it required all sorts of awkward hand movements and lent itself to no finger tricks.
Since almost every one of my solves requires an edge cycle — with H and Z perms or the rare PLL skip as the lone exceptions — this bull-in-a-china-shop algorithm had to go. Enter the U perm:
adventures in cubing 