Cubing Tips Part 3 - I'm still talking about practice.

I really wanted to wax philosophical about practice, but I think it's more important to nail down some specific things that will help people practice speedcubing more effectively. This will mostly be aimed at CFOP solvers, but I will try to add comments for Roux.

1) Slow, untimed solves. This is effective regardless of the method used. Work on consistency of steps, looking ahead, not turning the whole cube very much, and turning smoothly. If you wanted to take this idea to the next step, then start solving with a metronome dictating your speed, and then gradually increasing the speed while maintaining smoothness.

2) Work on your first four edges as an automatic reaction to what you see during inspection. Lots of random scrambles done slowly may start to get you familiar with what you have to do to keep your movecount down and cube turns to a minimum. Not everybody is going to start color neutral, so maybe at first you're just going to look at your target center and the four edge pieces that go with it for a lot of scrambles and see what the easiest way there is. However, some of them are not intuitive at first, and you might gain that knowledge by watching some machine solved cases. One of the extra features of the Android app Twisty Timer is that when it generates a scramble for 3x3x3, you can press the "Hint" button and it offers optimal solves for the first four edges for any of the six colors. Once you think that you can formulate a good plan, the next thing to do is to figure out if you can execute the plan without having to look at those pieces, because you need to start looking for what's next - the first corner/edge pair. For Roux solvers, apply this to the first block, and start looking for the second block.

3) As you execute the moves for each corner/edge pair to build the F2L, you need to locate the next pair of pieces for the next corner/edge pair. If you can see farther ahead than that, that's great. If you feel you're not doing something smoothly, look up a couple of different algorithms for that case and see what feels good. While the F2L should be done intuitively much like the first four pieces, it still may be helpful to learn some algorithms for the more difficult cases.  For Roux, the next step is the U layer corners, and is its own very difficult subset of algorithms, nearly as difficult as the last layer algorithms in CFOP, and probably will get accomplished using the main feature of item #4 below.

4)  For the last layer, my suggestion is drill, drill, drill.
Once you learn an algorithm, go on youtube and watch a couple of different people do the moves to look at move groupings and hand positions.
While the OLL is done before the PLL, and it might make sense to learn things in order, it's more important to learn the PLL first.  Early on you will only make use of only three or four of the OLL cases, having to use them in combination and even multiple times in some cases.

Once you feel like you have enough moves put together to finish the last layer, use the qqtimer subset feature to generate scrambles for the last layer.

For Roux, there is a different subset you can use that just scrambles the last six edges - it's labeled "Roux-generator ".

Don't forget, there's always more to practice (and not just at cubing).

It's important to have a plan - or Cubing Tips Part One.

There have been way too many games that came out recently, and I couldn't possibly talk about everything that I've been playing all at once. I have also picked up a couple of new cubes, and got another as a late Christmas gift. On top of that, I recently found out that I missed a cube competition less than an hour from my house - I didn't find out about it until the Monday after.

So, what do you do when everything is crazy? The same thing you do with a scrambled cube - have a plan. However, we're going to talk about planning only in the context of cubing here - I will just have to work on my plan to type more blog posts behind the scenes.

Clearly a plan is not enough by itself, because there are other parts to be considered during the actual execution. Practice is important, and so is a good handle on theory, and so is learning to deal with mistakes, setbacks, and things that just plain don't go your way. But, we have to start somewhere, and that usually starts with a plan.

In speed cubing, you get 15 seconds of inspection time. That's time you basically get for free that doesn't count as part of your solve time unless you're doing a blindfold event. That's the time to make a plan. For a fast solver it could make the difference of a second or two, which could make the difference between making the cut or not. For me, as a relatively slow solver, a good inspection makes the difference between a 30 second solve and a 40 second solve.  Even if you're just starting and you're averaging around a minute or two, a good inspection could still make a ten to fifteen second difference in your time. What are you looking for in the inspection?

For Beginner's Method solvers, you're looking for the first four edges, and a corner or two. For CFOP (Cross, First two layers, Orientation, Permutation) solvers, you're looking for the first four edges, and one or two corner-edge pairs for F2L. For Roux, you're looking for the first five pieces on the L face. For me, as a corners first solver, I'm looking for the first four corners and trying to figure out where the fifth corner is going to fit into the other layer, or if the first four corners go really easy then I'm looking for an edge piece or two in the first layer.

Statistically, most of you are using something that's like either the Beginner's Method or CFOP, so let's talk more about those. During inspection, you should have those first four edges of the first layer figured out either way. Have you figured out something that's around eight turns and leaves the cube in the right location for the next part? Do some practice scrambles and see if you can consistently work out a 7-8 move solution to the first four edges. Ultimately, you should be working towards having the first four edges on the D layer when you're done, allowing you to work on the next part with the best visibility of the remaining edges.

That's enough for now,  so go practice making a plan. (Or is that planning to practice?)

Big Cubes, and small setbacks.

I had been getting better at big cubes of late - not like actual better, just better for me. For 4x4x4, I'm under 2 minutes once in a while, and for 5x5x5 I'm under 5 minutes nearly half the time now. I finally felt like I could take another swing at my 7x7x7, because of those improvements. For 2x2 to 5x5 it takes me somewhere in the ballpark of 6 times whatever the WR is. (Here's a new WR on the 5x5x5 by Feliks Zemdegs.)




By that logic, I should be able to get my 7x7x7 time down to around 15-16 minutes - my best previous time is 37 minutes and change. Here's another one from Feliks, this time on the 7x7x7.


It's not even like I was sure that it was going to happen, but I just feel like I need to be in the right frame of mind to make progress and do well. The bigger the cube gets, it reduces the number of times you can practice it in a session, and I have to say that I haven't practiced 7x7x7 that often at all. Part of it is that I get nervous about pushing those little stickers around with my hands when I'm turning the cube, so maybe I'm going to have to think about finding a stickerless 7x7x7 at some point. I don't think I want one of the pink ones though, the colors aren't high contrast enough for me.  I'm sure that the other part of it is that my 7x7x7 is a V-Cube and some of the newer cubes have a better mechanism than the V-Cube does.

But, this morning, I was really ready to do it, and got 1:47 in AND POPPED OUT A CENTER PIECE! Frankly, I'm a little bit amazed that I was able to get it back into place without major disassembly.

I started typing this once, and thought that it was going to be about failure, but decided that I had to do it again. I just re-scrambled from the partial solve for several minutes, took a deep breath, and started the 7x7x7 again. It was 27:12.21. Certainly it wasn't 15 minutes, and I'm sure I burned a few minutes making sure layers were correctly aligned so that I didn't pop a center piece again like last time. Hey, it's 10 minutes better than my previous, so I'll take it.

Problem solving takes practice, and practice takes problem solving.

It's probably been a while since I've talked about practice.

I'm sure part of the problem is that I feel like I haven't been doing enough of it, and the other part of the problem that every time I even say the word to myself I start replaying the classic Steve Porter jam "Press Hop" in my head.



But, let's put that aside for a moment. (Or, I'll wait the four minutes for you to watch the video. Whatevs.)

So, the other day, one of my friends called me up with a sample question from a study on cognitive bias, because they were reading an article in a magazine about the difference between intelligence and common sense and wanted to see if I could correctly answer a question that more than 50% of people asked from really expensive schools got wrong. I was able to come up with the right answer, and the study would suggest that if I were smarter I wouldn't have gotten it right because...

No, that doesn't make sense at all. People that practice certain kinds of problem solving are going to be inherently good at those kinds of problems. The article doesn't even say what the breakdown by discipline was for the people that got it wrong, or if there was any commonality to the students that got it right.

Yes, cognitive bias exists. Anchoring, where the mind tethers to the first piece of information given even if it's faulty, is a bad one - especially when a subject is rushed to make a decision. It's also not difficult to find lots of other different types of cognitive bias, and I would agree that overall being more intelligent doesn't necessarily solve that problem. For certain skills that we don't utilize all the time, but that we think we have a handle on, people fall back on strategies that are easy to retain and are often overly simplistic, often leading to odd biases that don't hold up to rational analysis. However, for a specific type of problem, you are going to find people that practice that skill and won't fall prey to a particular bias. (I would be genuinely surprised if any Algebra teachers missed the problem in the Gizmodo article that I linked to.)

I would even say that problem solving itself takes practice. You're not going to know where the oil goes in a car the first time you open the hood, and you might get slapped the first time you talk to some people, but if you're paying attention and the results are important to you, those are solvable problems. Analyzing word problems in math and becoming better at them is conducive to forming good habits when turning words into equations. Learning what things to look for, and having a plan when you can't initially find something to work from, takes multiple tries at observation, analysis, revision, and trial.

These are all the things that we do when we practice well. We work on a thing, and we try to observe it in some way. Perhaps it's a video camera, or a tape player, or sometimes it's the watchful eye of an instructor. Then, we analyze our observation. After analysis, it's time to make revisions and try again. What did we do well? What needs work? Do I know how to address the things that need work, or do I need to consult outside information?

What I find even more interesting about this is that in general, doing things tends to only make you better at that thing. Want to be better at Pac-Man? Play more Pac-Man. Certainly, you can memorize the pattern from a book, but it won't be much help if you're not really playing the game enough to learn how the joystick responds in certain situations. Want to memorize more of your grocery list? You have to work on it. Make a system, create mnemonic devices if you have to, visualize the list in your head, but do it, and learn, and do it again.

Can you play a bunch of brain games and make yourself smarter? Probably not, and for the reason I just stated. Doing a thing is only going to help you get better at that thing. Now, if the brain game is memorizing a list of 20 things, that might help you with your grocery list problem - or you could just write out your grocery list and play Pac-Man instead.

For some more insight into what you can do with practice, and how looking at something new is different from looking at it the hundredth time, try reading this interview with my favorite French Horn player.

Things to be thankful for...

So, it's Black Friday weekend, and all of us have been trying as hard as we can to get screen time. Everybody was on their DS on Thursday since we spent a lot of it in the car. My older son is working on Pokemon Alpha Sapphire on his Nintendo 3DS, and my younger son was playing more Scribblenauts and some Desktop Tower Defense on his 2DS. About the only thing that I bring to play on DS is my Korg DS cartridge, and I had fun figuring out how to make some drum noises that don't really sound like drums.

My older son and I are still trying to unlock all of the characters on Hyrule Warriors, and it seems like we've had to do a lot of repeated boards to get our characters leveled up enough to face the later challenges. I still have a long way to go on the WiiU version of Bayonetta and the new Bayonetta 2. I was in Gamestop the other day and my regular cashier asked me if I had started the new Smash Bros. game for WiiU, and my exasperated answer was that I still had a long way to go on the last two games that I got! We haven't even talked about the new LEGO Batman 3 game, since my older son and I are casually pretending that the game's not out yet so we're not inundated for requests from my younger son to pick up the game some weekend with Christmas on the way.

The first add-on pack for Mario Kart 8 came out a couple of weeks ago, and the playable Link character and the Hyrule Castle board are both nice additions to the game. I haven't played with the Tanooki Mario or Cat Peach characters yet, but I did see that some of the other courses make for some multiplayer insanity.  The Excitebike course has super-long straightaways leading to lots of shell-flinging shenanigans. Ice Ice Outpost is full of multiple paths most of which require rather precision driving or you will easily find yourself taking an ice bath.

So, even though I haven't picked up either of the newest systems, the PS4 or the XBox One, it still seems like there are plenty of games to play. There are still games coming out for the PS3, and the WiiU seems to have a steady stream of new releases coming out soon to be bolstered by the presence of the newest addition to the WiiU system, the amiibo.  Similar to their Skylanders and Disney Infinity counterparts, an amiibo is a plastic representation of one of the Nintendo characters with some electronics inside that will identify it to the WiiU. Unlike the Skylanders and Disney Infinity characters which each require their own portal, the Amiibo can talk directly to the WiiU gamepad. There is a newer model of the 3DS that has not been released yet that will also be able to read the amiibo information. For the 3DS and 2DS units that are already out, there will be an external  peripheral that will be released next year. Even more curiously, the amiibos do different things in different games. In Smash Bros., they become a specific character that you work on leveling up, in a very similar fashion to how they work in Skylanders and Disney Infinity. In Hyrule Warriors, different amiibos interact with the game in different ways. Some amiibos of the Zelda series characters give you weapons, and from the in-game description it sounds like some of the other ones give you random gifts (which I can only presume are materials to craft upgrades from). In Mario Kart 8, you can customize your Mii racer with an outfit based on the character that your amiibo is based on. I hope that they find other interesting ways to utilize these.

I am also looking forward to Street Fighter IV's upcoming Omega Mode patch, which will add a different version of each of the World Warriors to the line up, with different special moves and inputs. While the existing version of Ultra allows you to play as any previous Street Fighter IV version of any of the characters, the differences between those four versions are rather subtle and are just adjustments to the nuances of the game's balance. The Omega Mode versions are rather different, as you can see here.

So, what am I thankful for (as a gamer) this holiday season? I am thankful for the fact that there are more games out than I have time to play. That reminds me. I need to get ready for band practice.

Practice makes... more practice.

I was picking up my new pair of glasses the other day, and ended up explaining my take on the cube to the tech that did the final fit and one of the waiting customers there. I had done the same with the woman that scheduled the optometrists' appointments the previous weekend, and both times I was feeling really on the mark, like delivering good comedy or a convincing musical performance. I was wishing a little bit that I could get somebody else to film me doing this, just because I've never actually seen it, and I'm not entirely convinced I could just fire up a camera on a tripod and run through my schtick for nobody. Part of the reason that it's a little bit different every time is that I usually tend to tailor my responses to the initial questions, and then steer the presentation in to my standard bit when it seems right to do so. I'm not even thinking about that when I'm doing it, it just seems to go that way on its own.

At lunch the subsequent Friday, feeling confident with my new glasses, I got the "how long does it take you/what's your fastest time" questions and I started feeling a little disappointed that that number hadn't really changed much. I answered the rest of their questions and went to eat my lunch. While I ate, reflecting on my good performances the previous day, it occurred to me that it is pretty rare that I work on my speed specifically. What I tend to work on is exactly what I'm doing - explaining the Rubik's cube to people while I'm solving it. If I were using a faster solution method, I wouldn't have enough time to explain it while I was doing it. I also wouldn't have enough spare processing ability to be able to talk while I did some of the more complicated moves, especially at first when I would still be learning them.


So that got me thinking - what we practice is what we do is what we practice. Ok, so that's not worded well. Let's think about this in terms of music for a moment. If you spend all your time practicing by yourself, you can develop considerable technique but you are surrounded by a mostly comfortable situation - your roof, your room, your, idiosyncrasies, your accompaniment (if any), and your lack of an audience. You run the risk of not absorbing new input, and the challenges you face are fairly small and usually self-imposed. This is why for most players there is much value in both teaching and public performance.

The value in teaching others comes from many things. First, it forces us to strengthen our foundation of knowledge on the subject, purely by repetition. Second, we are presented with students that are approaching these ideas with (hopefully) a new mind. Sometimes the fresh perspective is invigorating to the teacher, allowing them to re-approach ideas with a new mind themselves. Sometimes the fresh perspective just helps us re-verify the ideas while we teach them to our students. Sometimes the fresh perspective makes us reevaluate some ideas and throw out some ideas entirely, but this is usually more difficult to do. Third, now we have a reason to communicate ideas back and forth. In our musical example, this would usually be some sort of musical notation. (In the cubing world, I might communicate an idea like R'D'RD'R'D2R'.) In dealing with other persons, both as students and as audience members, we are presented with the concept of hazard. Sometimes there are mistakes, and it is a necessary part of the interaction.

This brings us to the value of performance. In our musical example, we are strengthened by our interactions with other musicians, and it gives us more reason to communicate musical ideas although usually this happens in a more informal way. Instead of using strict musical notation, the ideas may be as simple as a set of lyrics and some chords to go with them. (In the cubing world, talking to other cubers at a competition, I might say, what moves do you use for the Sune and the Y permutation?) The level that the communication takes place at is usually raised by the level of skill of the participants. We are influenced by the different styles, methods, and presentations of our fellow participants, both in other groups and our own group. The outside influences add dimensions to our own ideas that we would not have had in isolation. We are also presented by more aspects of hazard. Will the microphones shock us if it starts raining? Can anybody in the back of the room hear the acoustic guitar? Are we going to remember the new ending that we just rehearsed last month the one time? Is the movie theater going to call and say we're playing too loud? (Cuber example: If I use my faster, looser cube to gain speed do I run the risk of having a piece pop out during a solve?) The best things that we learn from performance are usually not how to avoid hazard, but how to skillfully deal with it.

We must practice so that many things are second nature and we do not have to give those things our attention. We must practice so that when hazard appears we can give it our attention to minimize it. If this is not what we do, if we do not place ourselves in hazard's way, then we are ill-equipped when it finally occurs.

So, for me, for now, that means that I stick with my performance art/comedy bit/one-on-one cubing presentations, since I have a bit that's only designed for a small group of people.

While I'm thinking of it, for those of you that need to read more about the inherent hazards of musical performance, please go read my friend Nikki's blog at http://nyohshootilostmypassport.blogspot.com/.