Post by goldensandslash on Mar 4, 2024 5:42:00 GMT
Okay, yes, that title is clickbait.
Max Park, the world record holder in solving a Rubik's Cube, at 3.13 seconds, signed to compete at a Rubik's Cube competition today in Aliso Viejo. And... as it turns out... this was also a competition that I signed up for (I signed up before he did though, so I didn't sign up because of that). It was my first ever competition, and after getting text messages throughout the day asking how it went... I figured I'd do a quick write-up.
Now, let's start with the disappointing part: Max Park opted to not show up and chose not to compete. Therefore, I beat him by default! (On the actual WCA website, it just shows him as having not signed up at all, so this isn't actually how it works.) It was a little unfortunate, as I was looking forward to seeing him, but ultimately, twas not meant to be. But it let me use this clickbait title, so that's the silver lining.
The other bad part was needing to wake up super-early to get to the competition. But that's another story.
Anyways, there's seventeen different events that competitions are allowed to host (see footnote 1), and this particular competition hosted four of them.
The first event was the traditional 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube.
It takes me just over a minute to solve one, because... here's the thing: I do not care about speed. I'm unlike most cubing enthusiasts. Rather than learning faster methods, I'd rather learn entirely new twisty puzzles. I pride myself in the number of different puzzles that I can solve, not the speed at which I can solve them.
You get five chances to solve the cube. My times were as follows: 1:07.44, 1:12.85, 1:07.76, 1:22.16, and 1:08.67.
To get your official score, you eliminate your best time and your worst time, and then average the remaining three times. So my score was 1:09.76.
Going into this, I expected that to get last place. After all, a lot of speedcubers can consistently get under 20 seconds, even at the amateur level, with enough knowledge and practice. (But, as previously stated, I am not a "speed" cuber.)
After I finished competing, I also had a round of judging other competitors.
Judging is surprisingly something that I found more fun than competing. With competing, you're so focused on the cube that it gets a little boring. You're just doing the same thing again and again: solving the cube. With judging, you actually get to watch others solve, and at varying skill levels, so you never know what you're gonna see.
Case in point, one of the competitors I was judging was Nancy Liu, a girl who got the best score in this first round, and later went on to place 2nd overall in the competition. Just seeing what she did was incredible. First up, before even starting her solve, she set up her phone and a tripod, to record her solve so that she could look back on it later and analyze for improvements. Then she also had a practice cube with her that she was scrambling and solving in order to warm up. And when she was done with that. She got some hand-warming devices out in order to warm up her hands to increase her turning speed. And only then did she actually begin her attempt. Absolutely incredible.
Okay, enough about her though. What about me? How did I do? Did I get last place, as I expected? Well, no. To my surprise, I only placed 152nd out of 166 people. It was still bad enough that there was no way that I would qualify for future rounds, but hey... it was a better placing than I thought.
The next event being offered was the 4x4x4 cube. Solving this is considerably harder than the 3x3x3 cube. But notably, it takes a lot longer. It typically takes me about three minutes.
Because of this, this would have caused the competition to fall behind schedule if they had done a full five rounds for slow solvers. So they instituted a rule that you must achieve a time of less than 1:30.00 in one of your first two attempts, or else you don't get the other three attempts.
So... yeah, I'm only getting to do two solves.
And, tragically, this is where it fell apart.
My first solve... I ended up messing up my cube's color scheme, and needing to fix it. That's an annoying time-waster. But even worse... I then realized that I actually DIDN'T mess it up and I had it right the first time, so I needed to un-fix it. And in the process of doing so... I messed it up even worse and it just made it so much worse. At this point, I was just basically just having to start over the whole solve. And this was after over three minutes. So I opted to just stop and get a score of DNF (Did Not Finish).
My second solve... I came so close to finishing (again, in about three minutes). All I had left to do was the yellow corners. But then... as it turns out, I got PLL Parity, which is a thing that can happen on even-numbered cubes. If you don't know what that is, basically it's a scenario where the pieces are arranged in such a way that it would be literally impossible to solve it with 3x3x3 moves alone, so you need to do something special to fix it. And I do know how to fix this! But in the heat of the moment... I messed up, and ended up just screwing up everything else that I had previously done. Yet again, it would mean restarting the whole solve if I continued from here. So I took another DNF.
With two DNFs, that automatically put me in last place. Looking at the results, had I not messed up and done what I had meant to do, I would have taken 83rd place out of 84 people. So it wasn't that big of a loss.
After that came another round of judging.
Then came the next event: solving a 3x3x3 cube... with only one hand.
Now, I have done this before a few times. And every single time, it hurts my hand to do. To the point where I knew doing five solves of this in quick succession was a terrible terrible idea. So this was the one event of the four that I opted to not sign up for.
So I took the opportunity to explore the venue a bit. Aliso Niguel High School. Funnily enough, it was school-election season. So I saw a lot of campaign posters for these. And one person's political slogan (which was on multiple of their signs) was "Drake for President: What's the worst that can happen?". Obviously, school elections are meaningless popularity contests that don't grant any actual powers to the student. The only thing that you "win" is just something you can throw on a college application and an extra photo in the yearbook. So this is an entirely pointless election. But... I do actually admire that political slogan. I kinda want to see an actual politician use it, and I would genuinely respect it for the honesty of it.
Since I wasn't competing in the one-handed event, and my time slot for the final event was fairly late into the event, I decided that this would be a good opportunity to get some lunch. So I went to a nearby Mod Pizza (see footnote 2). It was quite delicious.
After that was the final event, the 2x2x2 cube. This is a much easier puzzle than a standard Rubik's Cube, and I was fairly confident that I could do well here. But... remember when I said I got up at 5AM today? Well... that was starting to catch up to me. I was so tired. And I still had to sit through two more rounds of 2x2x2 cubing before my round would be called up.
So I just opted to drop out of the competition at this point, so that I could go home and get some sleep.
It was very much worth it, because I just... was not feeling up to it at the time. But looking back on it in hindsight, I do wish I had toughed it out for that last round.
But I did pick up a souvenir on my way out. I bought a new puzzle: a Rubik's Magic (see footnote 3). This is a puzzle that I didn't have in my collection until now. I have no idea how it works, but I can't wait to spend the next few days or weeks figuring it out (or months, if it's especially tricky).
Overall, I had a lot of fun. I do wish that my 4x4x4 solves went better and that I had tried to do 2x2x2, but hey... there's always future competitions. If you do badly, that means there's only one direction to go from here. Since I am able to solve all 11 puzzles that are offered in official competitions (see footnote 4), I think it would be nice to get a recorded time on all eleven puzzles, but as it stands now, I just have one. Oh well, baby steps.
After I left, the competition continued for further rounds of these events, for those who got good-enough times to qualify for them, but I knew going into it that this would not be me. So I'm not disappointed at all - it's exactly as I expected.
----
FOOTNOTES
(Footnote 1) The seventeen events are the standard cubes of varying sizes (2x2x2, 3x3x3, 4x4x4, 5x5x5, 6x6x6, 7x7x7), the Pyraminx (a tetrahedron-shaped twisty puzzle), the Megaminx (a dodecahedron-shaped twisty puzzle), the Rubik's Clock (a puzzle in which you spin dials to affect the various clock faces on the cube and you want to get them to all show 12 o'clock at the same time), the Skewb (a cube-shaped puzzle that turns by twisting its corners instead of its edges), the Square-1 (a puzzle that is cubic in its solved state, but can shapeshift as you make moves on it), and then twists on these. The first is solving a cube blindfolded, which is offered in three sizes (3x3x3, 4x4x4, 5x5x5). The second is doing it one-handed (3x3x3). The third is what they call "multi-blind". In this event, you submit as many 3x3x3 cubes as you want, then you have an hour to memorize all of them (see footnote 5) and then put on a blindfold and try to solve them all in a row at once. The final event is the "fewest moves challenge", which is a lot like taking an exam. They hand you a piece of paper with a Rubik's Cube scramble on it (3x3x3) and you have one hour to come up with the shortest possible sequence of moves that will solve it. But you're not actually solving it in real-time.
(Footnote 2) If you think that you've never heard of Mod Pizza, you've probably heard of it before under a different name. It's one of those pizza places where you tell them what you want on your pizza and they make it for you right in front of you like Subway does to sandwiches. There's a whole bunch of chains that do this now, like Blaze Pizza and Pieology, so you may be more familiar with it under another name.
(Footnote 3) The Rubik's Magic is a puzzle that has pictures of rings on it that can link or unlink as you fold them over. I don't fully get it yet. But one thing that is notable about this is that even though this is one of the infinitely-large number of twisty puzzles that isn't used in official competitions, it actually did USED TO BE in official competitions, alongside its more advanced version, the Master Magic. They were removed from official competitions starting in 2012. The only other event to be removed was solving a 3x3x3 with your feet, which was removed starting in 2020.
(Footnote 4) I can't do all the events, but I can do all the puzzles. I have no idea how to solve a cube blindfolded.
(Footnote 5) The actual time given is ten minutes per cube, if you submit fewer than six cubes. But then you only get one hour for the whole lot once you hit six cubes or more. I was just simplifying it for the sake of simplicity.
Max Park, the world record holder in solving a Rubik's Cube, at 3.13 seconds, signed to compete at a Rubik's Cube competition today in Aliso Viejo. And... as it turns out... this was also a competition that I signed up for (I signed up before he did though, so I didn't sign up because of that). It was my first ever competition, and after getting text messages throughout the day asking how it went... I figured I'd do a quick write-up.
Now, let's start with the disappointing part: Max Park opted to not show up and chose not to compete. Therefore, I beat him by default! (On the actual WCA website, it just shows him as having not signed up at all, so this isn't actually how it works.) It was a little unfortunate, as I was looking forward to seeing him, but ultimately, twas not meant to be. But it let me use this clickbait title, so that's the silver lining.
The other bad part was needing to wake up super-early to get to the competition. But that's another story.
Anyways, there's seventeen different events that competitions are allowed to host (see footnote 1), and this particular competition hosted four of them.
The first event was the traditional 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube.
It takes me just over a minute to solve one, because... here's the thing: I do not care about speed. I'm unlike most cubing enthusiasts. Rather than learning faster methods, I'd rather learn entirely new twisty puzzles. I pride myself in the number of different puzzles that I can solve, not the speed at which I can solve them.
You get five chances to solve the cube. My times were as follows: 1:07.44, 1:12.85, 1:07.76, 1:22.16, and 1:08.67.
To get your official score, you eliminate your best time and your worst time, and then average the remaining three times. So my score was 1:09.76.
Going into this, I expected that to get last place. After all, a lot of speedcubers can consistently get under 20 seconds, even at the amateur level, with enough knowledge and practice. (But, as previously stated, I am not a "speed" cuber.)
After I finished competing, I also had a round of judging other competitors.
Judging is surprisingly something that I found more fun than competing. With competing, you're so focused on the cube that it gets a little boring. You're just doing the same thing again and again: solving the cube. With judging, you actually get to watch others solve, and at varying skill levels, so you never know what you're gonna see.
Case in point, one of the competitors I was judging was Nancy Liu, a girl who got the best score in this first round, and later went on to place 2nd overall in the competition. Just seeing what she did was incredible. First up, before even starting her solve, she set up her phone and a tripod, to record her solve so that she could look back on it later and analyze for improvements. Then she also had a practice cube with her that she was scrambling and solving in order to warm up. And when she was done with that. She got some hand-warming devices out in order to warm up her hands to increase her turning speed. And only then did she actually begin her attempt. Absolutely incredible.
Okay, enough about her though. What about me? How did I do? Did I get last place, as I expected? Well, no. To my surprise, I only placed 152nd out of 166 people. It was still bad enough that there was no way that I would qualify for future rounds, but hey... it was a better placing than I thought.
The next event being offered was the 4x4x4 cube. Solving this is considerably harder than the 3x3x3 cube. But notably, it takes a lot longer. It typically takes me about three minutes.
Because of this, this would have caused the competition to fall behind schedule if they had done a full five rounds for slow solvers. So they instituted a rule that you must achieve a time of less than 1:30.00 in one of your first two attempts, or else you don't get the other three attempts.
So... yeah, I'm only getting to do two solves.
And, tragically, this is where it fell apart.
My first solve... I ended up messing up my cube's color scheme, and needing to fix it. That's an annoying time-waster. But even worse... I then realized that I actually DIDN'T mess it up and I had it right the first time, so I needed to un-fix it. And in the process of doing so... I messed it up even worse and it just made it so much worse. At this point, I was just basically just having to start over the whole solve. And this was after over three minutes. So I opted to just stop and get a score of DNF (Did Not Finish).
My second solve... I came so close to finishing (again, in about three minutes). All I had left to do was the yellow corners. But then... as it turns out, I got PLL Parity, which is a thing that can happen on even-numbered cubes. If you don't know what that is, basically it's a scenario where the pieces are arranged in such a way that it would be literally impossible to solve it with 3x3x3 moves alone, so you need to do something special to fix it. And I do know how to fix this! But in the heat of the moment... I messed up, and ended up just screwing up everything else that I had previously done. Yet again, it would mean restarting the whole solve if I continued from here. So I took another DNF.
With two DNFs, that automatically put me in last place. Looking at the results, had I not messed up and done what I had meant to do, I would have taken 83rd place out of 84 people. So it wasn't that big of a loss.
After that came another round of judging.
Then came the next event: solving a 3x3x3 cube... with only one hand.
Now, I have done this before a few times. And every single time, it hurts my hand to do. To the point where I knew doing five solves of this in quick succession was a terrible terrible idea. So this was the one event of the four that I opted to not sign up for.
So I took the opportunity to explore the venue a bit. Aliso Niguel High School. Funnily enough, it was school-election season. So I saw a lot of campaign posters for these. And one person's political slogan (which was on multiple of their signs) was "Drake for President: What's the worst that can happen?". Obviously, school elections are meaningless popularity contests that don't grant any actual powers to the student. The only thing that you "win" is just something you can throw on a college application and an extra photo in the yearbook. So this is an entirely pointless election. But... I do actually admire that political slogan. I kinda want to see an actual politician use it, and I would genuinely respect it for the honesty of it.
Since I wasn't competing in the one-handed event, and my time slot for the final event was fairly late into the event, I decided that this would be a good opportunity to get some lunch. So I went to a nearby Mod Pizza (see footnote 2). It was quite delicious.
After that was the final event, the 2x2x2 cube. This is a much easier puzzle than a standard Rubik's Cube, and I was fairly confident that I could do well here. But... remember when I said I got up at 5AM today? Well... that was starting to catch up to me. I was so tired. And I still had to sit through two more rounds of 2x2x2 cubing before my round would be called up.
So I just opted to drop out of the competition at this point, so that I could go home and get some sleep.
It was very much worth it, because I just... was not feeling up to it at the time. But looking back on it in hindsight, I do wish I had toughed it out for that last round.
But I did pick up a souvenir on my way out. I bought a new puzzle: a Rubik's Magic (see footnote 3). This is a puzzle that I didn't have in my collection until now. I have no idea how it works, but I can't wait to spend the next few days or weeks figuring it out (or months, if it's especially tricky).
Overall, I had a lot of fun. I do wish that my 4x4x4 solves went better and that I had tried to do 2x2x2, but hey... there's always future competitions. If you do badly, that means there's only one direction to go from here. Since I am able to solve all 11 puzzles that are offered in official competitions (see footnote 4), I think it would be nice to get a recorded time on all eleven puzzles, but as it stands now, I just have one. Oh well, baby steps.
After I left, the competition continued for further rounds of these events, for those who got good-enough times to qualify for them, but I knew going into it that this would not be me. So I'm not disappointed at all - it's exactly as I expected.
----
FOOTNOTES
(Footnote 1) The seventeen events are the standard cubes of varying sizes (2x2x2, 3x3x3, 4x4x4, 5x5x5, 6x6x6, 7x7x7), the Pyraminx (a tetrahedron-shaped twisty puzzle), the Megaminx (a dodecahedron-shaped twisty puzzle), the Rubik's Clock (a puzzle in which you spin dials to affect the various clock faces on the cube and you want to get them to all show 12 o'clock at the same time), the Skewb (a cube-shaped puzzle that turns by twisting its corners instead of its edges), the Square-1 (a puzzle that is cubic in its solved state, but can shapeshift as you make moves on it), and then twists on these. The first is solving a cube blindfolded, which is offered in three sizes (3x3x3, 4x4x4, 5x5x5). The second is doing it one-handed (3x3x3). The third is what they call "multi-blind". In this event, you submit as many 3x3x3 cubes as you want, then you have an hour to memorize all of them (see footnote 5) and then put on a blindfold and try to solve them all in a row at once. The final event is the "fewest moves challenge", which is a lot like taking an exam. They hand you a piece of paper with a Rubik's Cube scramble on it (3x3x3) and you have one hour to come up with the shortest possible sequence of moves that will solve it. But you're not actually solving it in real-time.
(Footnote 2) If you think that you've never heard of Mod Pizza, you've probably heard of it before under a different name. It's one of those pizza places where you tell them what you want on your pizza and they make it for you right in front of you like Subway does to sandwiches. There's a whole bunch of chains that do this now, like Blaze Pizza and Pieology, so you may be more familiar with it under another name.
(Footnote 3) The Rubik's Magic is a puzzle that has pictures of rings on it that can link or unlink as you fold them over. I don't fully get it yet. But one thing that is notable about this is that even though this is one of the infinitely-large number of twisty puzzles that isn't used in official competitions, it actually did USED TO BE in official competitions, alongside its more advanced version, the Master Magic. They were removed from official competitions starting in 2012. The only other event to be removed was solving a 3x3x3 with your feet, which was removed starting in 2020.
(Footnote 4) I can't do all the events, but I can do all the puzzles. I have no idea how to solve a cube blindfolded.
(Footnote 5) The actual time given is ten minutes per cube, if you submit fewer than six cubes. But then you only get one hour for the whole lot once you hit six cubes or more. I was just simplifying it for the sake of simplicity.