Cubing in public, and a super cuber in California.

My kids, my wife, my beach cube and I all went to the Deerfield Beach Surfers for Autism event a couple of days ago and we had a fair amount of fun, even though I only did maybe one in-depth cube demonstration for one of the vendors and only one waiting in line with participants. The most important things I learned were:

• If you have an extra Coke, share it.
• If the surf is rough, paddle harder.
• I really like chimichurri on french fries.

I have been doing cube demonstrations fairly often, probably a couple a week, just waiting in line at the grocery store or getting lunch. I did one today at a local sandwich place, where they wanted to see a full-on speedsolve while my sandwich contents were cooking, and I didn't bother with my usual round of explanations. Another patron filmed it, however I'm guessing that I won't see it despite my attempts because I'm always too flustered to say "No Spaces!" when I tell people that my youtube channel is SuperMonkeyCube. If you do a search for "super monkey cube" on youtube all you get is silly Super Monkey Ball results. I was even more psyched than usual because the person at the sandwich place that helped me and wanted to see the speedsolve was so jazzed to show me a prism that they carry around with them in order to demonstrate light dispersion when you look through two sides of it, creating funky rainbow effects. Since at heart, I'm just a person that's super-excited about their hobby, it warms my heart to see other science and math enthusiasts do their thing.

The other day at Publix I did my usual round of demonstrations, only to have a woman tell me "You should put this on Youtube." The one thing that I really want to have on Youtube that I really don't have on Youtube is exactly that thing. I want to have a person casually ask me about the cube, we have a little back-and-forth conversation about what their understanding is and I try to clear up their misconceptions, and I demonstrate what they want demonstrated, and do a solve or two to show them what they want to see. The problem for me is that I can't do that while filming it myself, and adding a cameraperson will likely ruin the spontaneity of the whole thing unless I'm constantly followed by a hidden camera crew (which I'm guessing might run me into trouble with the sorts of retail establishments that these interchanges normally take place in). However, maybe if I let it be known that I'd like a camera operator or two and a demonstration victim shemp fake shemp lovely assistant whatever you call the person you're doing the demonstration for, maybe I will be able to round up some volunteers.

Having had a birthday recently, I got a couple of cube-related things, but those will have to wait until another post. Another bit of cube news is too timely, and takes precedence.

Max Park - shown here at the OCSEF Open 2017 in Costa Mesa,CA - breaks the world record average by .06 seconds. Prior to this event, Max was ranked 6th in the world for average time at 6.92 seconds, with a personal best of 5.92 ranking him at 29th in the world for single solve. Also, prior to this event, Feliks Zemdegs held the Ao5 average record for the previous seven years.

If you check out the analysis by BrestCubing on reddit, you can see that Max doesn't really solve like Feliks does.

Feliks tends towards a variety of a lot of very advanced techniques - XCross (eXtended Cross - solving one or more of the four corner-edge pairs while solving the first four edge pieces that are typically referred to as the Cross.) ZBLL (Zborowski-Bruchem Last Layer which has algorithms for all possible last layer cases where the edges are already oriented) and some other freestyle block-building methods borrowed from the Roux and Petrus methods. This means that Feliks is trying to optimize what he's doing for many different kinds of initial positions and find something that's the most turn-efficient for what he sees. Felix's best competition solve of 4.73 seconds was only 43 moves.

When you review Max's solves, what you see is that the only solve where he tries to do something fancy (solve 2 where he does a partial cross before bringing in the first corner edge pair) is his slowest solve (7.26 sec) and second highest move count (68). His other solves are very straightforward, and just plain fast. Max's fastest solve, a competition best for him, was a 5.60 with 62 moves - just over 11 turns per second.

This does make me wonder about the number of algorithms that someone can have memorized and be able to execute them solidly. It's not necessarily worthwhile to have a multitude of algorithms under your belt if a few of them are going to be a little slower than the other ones, and the more different things you have algorithms for mean more cases that you have to be able to recognize. One of the reasons that there are more CFOP solvers than other methods is because it's less abstract to explain and easier to identify cases.

Well, maybe I'm going to have to practice with a metronome more. (Bass and cubing.)