pll

Adventures in ‘Minxing

Adventures in Cubing1 Comment

megaminxA friend and I have a unspoken tradition of buying gag gifts for each other off our Amazon wish-lists, which amounts to us placing a bunch of random stuff on the lists to see what the other orders. Traditionally, it’s been music or movies, but we’ve definitely had some weird things come up — digital home thermostats, drill bits, and the like. Long ago, I placed a stickerless Dayan Megaminx (a dodecahedron shaped puzzle) on my list and forgot about it. I had no real interest in it, had no expectation of ever being able to solve it (I was a 2-minute 3×3 solver at the time), and, more than anything, thought it would be a funny item for the wishlist. Lo and behold, it arrived at my house last December. I messed with a few times, got frustrated, and stashed it on my shelf.

A couple days ago, my 19-month-old brought it over to me, having scrambled it on his way. My OCD thusly challenged, solve it I had to. Which meant learning how to solve it.

I approached it entirely intuitively after realizing through a couple web searches that it’s essentially a complicated 3×3 — with 12 faces (rather than six), each with 5 edges and 5 corners (rather than 4). I experimented a couple times and then, on my third, decided to give it a go on video. Here is the result — a 10-minute solve (excluding the last layer), presented at 3x speed: Continue reading →

PLL Time Attack (72 seconds)

Adventures in Cubing4 Comments

It’s been a little while since I felt like I’ve accomplished much in terms of cubing, especially after plateauing at about 30-35 seconds on 3×3 solves. So, I decided to revisit PLL time attacks, and, after a few days of practice, got a good outcome: an on-camera 72-second PLL attack that started and ended with a solved cube:

(music: Dexter Gordon, “Scrapple from the Apple”; cube: Zhanchi w/ ModCuber fitted full-bright stickers)

By way of brief background, PLL is the last step in CFOP — once you have a solved bottom face, solved bottom two layers, and solved top face. All that’s left is to get those four edges and four corners in the top layer rejiggered into their proper position. There are 21 PLL cases (22 if you count solved), each named after a letter that somewhat resembles the pattern of the edge and corner swaps. More detailed background and the PLL algorithms can be found on the speedsolving.com wiki.

A PLL time attack is the performance of each of the 21 PLLs in a stream without stopping. Completing it in a minute is respectable, but not amazing; forty-five seconds is really good; and better than that is truly impressive. When I first learned PLLs, I did a quasi time attack — quasi because it was truncated (I did the Gs separately), because I did each PLL individually (not in a single stream), and because I used my best of three attempts per PLL. The sum of the 21 parts was 66 seconds. Continue reading →

V Perm (Revisited)

Adventures in Cubing2 Comments

v permI remember learning the V Perm early in my PLL progress and being quite proud of myself. I even wrote this dedicated post containing a video showing my unimpressively slow execution. Unfortunately, the execution never got that much more fluid. Although it was an average speed perm for me when I did my (kinda sorta) PLL attack, it always was one of my clunkier ones.

Last weekend, jskyler91 posted a new Cubing World video showing a “non-standard” V Perm execution based on this algorithm:

z D’ R2′ D (R2 U R’) D’ (R U’) (R U R’) D (R U’) z’

No awkward re-grips and much smoother than the traditional approach. He bemoaned the z rotations; I was intimidated by all the D layer moves. Still, the fact that he could sub-1 the perm led me to believe that I could do it in 2. As this video shows, I’m close:

(music: Eldar Djangirov interpreting “Cool” (West Side Story); cube: Lubix Zhanchi w/ Cube Specialists fitted bright stickers and modded Cubesmith grey stickers for U face)

Continue reading →

U Perms (Revisited)

Adventures in Cubing11 Comments
Slow-Motion videos of these algorithms are available here.

U Perms. Round 3. I sort of accidentally learned the U Perm (edge cycling) through the Beginner’s Method and its clunky final algorithm: F2 U(’) R’ L F2 R L’ U(’) F2. Then I started learning PLLs and wrote about the more efficient approaches I had found (now-stricken in the table below). When I did my foozled PLL time attack, that Ua was my fastest with Ub second. But those still involved a lot of moves, and Ub had a sort of clunky flow.

When I learned double M flicks, I started doing Ua with the new M/U algorithm. But I couldn’t get Ub figured out, with my hands mis-positioned for the U’ turns. Then I stumbled onto Anotine Cantin’s video on how to fingertrick Ub. A little awkward at first with the right index finger pulling left to right for U’, but it wound up being pretty easy after a little practice. Here’s my video showing both:

Once I got the finger-tricks figured out, these wound up having a really nice flow. And, in contrast to the older versions, there’s an elegant symmetry to the clockwise and counter-clockwise algorithms.

U PERM (Edge Cycle)

Ua PLL
Counter-Clockwise

M2 U M U2 M’ U M2

(R U’ R U) (R U) (R U’) (R’ U’ R2)

Ub PLL
Clockwise

M2 U’ M U2 M’ U’ M2

(R2 U) (R U R’ U’) (R’ U’) (R’ U R’)

Onward….

Double M’ Flicks

Adventures in Cubing3 Comments

I’ve been working on double (ring-to-middle finger) M’ flicks for H Perm, rather than the paired single (ring finger) flicks that I’m used to. This wasn’t so much about speed as smoothness; at about 2.2 seconds, H is already one of my fastest PLLs. But I did pick up speed. With just a few minutes of practice, I got H Perm down to about 1.75 seconds. Here’s a quick video (my first edited in Final Cut Pro X), showing both approaches.

(music: “Cissy Strut” by The Meters)

Transferring this to Z Perm is going to take some work. It’s easy in H Perm to just go double-double-double-double. Much harder in Z Perm to go double-double-single-double-single. Working on it, though. More helpful, still, would be double U flicks. I’ve been having a hard time with those (these stumpy fingers of mine!). Maybe I’ll get the smaller 55mm Zhanchi to try to work on mechanics.

As for the Camcuber Zhanchi popping montage at the end: That might have been a little too (indirectly) critical of a cube that I’ve come to like even more since reviewing it last week. More than anything, I was just surprised to have so many pops on it — especially since I almost never pop a Zhanchi. I suppose I was pretty rough on it when I was learning the double-flicks….