M2M Day 66: Looking into the future
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For January, my goal is to solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 20 seconds.
Yesterday, I realized that Cube Rotations were majorly slowing me down during the intuition-based parts of my Rubik’s Cube solve. In an ideal world, I’d have only one or two rotations per solve, but instead, I have about 10–15.
As a reminder, these are Cube Rotations…
Yesterday, I discussed the positional reasons for Cube Rotations (and introduced Forced Rotationless Solving, FRS, as a potential solution). Today, I’ll address the other reason for rotations: Inspection Pauses.
Inspection Pauses
During F2L (solving the first 2 layers), I must correctly place eight pieces: four pairs of corresponding corners and edges.
In other words, during F2L, I must create four corner-edge pairs, and then place each pair in the correct position (called a “slot”) on the cube.
If you watch the video above, you’ll notice that I execute a fast series of moves. Then, I pause, rotate/inspect the cube until I find the next pair of pieces, execute another series of fast moves, and so on.
Basically, I’m not able to flow fluidly from pair to pair during F2L. Instead, my F2L is broken up by these inspection pauses.
Looking into the future
If I want to eliminate Inspection Pauses, I need to search for the next pair while I simultaneously execute the necessary moves for the current pair. In other words, I need to look into the future.
This is tough.
So, to practice, I’ve returned to using the Pulse metronome app, which I used in November to become a pseudo grand master of memory.
Here’s the idea: I set the metronome to something modest, like 90 BPM. Then, I attempt to solve the cube by making a turn every time the metronome clicks. As a result, by the nature of the exercise, all Inspection Pauses are (theoretically) eliminated, and the solve is consistent and fluid.
Even solving at 90 BPM, in this way, is surprisingly challenging for me. My brain really needs to work hard to both execute the moves and search for the next pieces simultaneously. But, as a result of this brain strain, I can feel my cube vision improving.
Better cube vision = faster solves, so nightmare-inducing metronome clicks are back in my life for at least the next week.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
