Saturday, June 17, 2017

Blindfold Solving

Rory is here for the weekend and to pick up the kiddos and take them home. We will be going to visit Raymond and fam this week and Ro and fam are moving to Washington soon.

Rory asked if I had seen the video of a little boy solving a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. I rarely watch solve videos of any kind nowadays. There was talk in the house about having to have a phenomenal memory to be able to do that. I didn't think so, so looked it up. I read a little and watched part of a video and am ready to try to do blindfold cubing. First I want to do more research on it, but I think I have the gist of solving pieces one by one using just a single algorithm. The algorithm is not the one that was given in the video. I am not going to learn any new algorithms to do this. Nor do I know the 5 or so algorithms in the article I read. I don't think they are necessary. I think I can do the whole cube with just one algorithm that I already know. The hard part will be memorizing the 20 key stickers in order. I think I will start with corners and see if I can just master that. Then add the edges later.

The video I watched part of is by J Perm.
The article I read part of is at ruwix.com.

After watching some and reading some I figured I would see if my idea to use the algorithm that came to mind might work. It works! I solved a scrambled cube using setup moves and one algorithm.

The algorithm: ( R'URU' R2 ) y ( L'U'LU ) y' x ( RUR'U'R2 ) x' U'

y = turn the entire cube so the Right face is in Front
x = turn the entire cube so the Bottom face is in Front

What does it do?
It swaps ULB and UBR.
It swaps UR and UL.

Might want to check out the different methods in the list on this page. I get the impression that most people that are interested in BLD solving are speedcubers. You know what that means. They want to memorize more algorithms to speed things up. The thing I like about the method I am working on devising is that it only uses one algorithm and I already know it.

A lot of blindfolded solvers memorize the cube using Speffz.

I've been thinking about a lettering/numbering scheme for memorizing and came up with something I haven't seen online but it makes sense to me.
U starts with A; L starts with E; F starts with I; R starts with O; B starts with U; D starts with 1.

I also need to get setup moves down—how to get any corner to ULB oriented correctly.

June 19, 2017
In thinking about the setup moves I realize there is a lot of work with the Left, Back, and Down faces. Pain. I am more used to working with Right, Front, and Up faces. So now I am thinking that I should move the corner that I want to swap to to DRF using the Up, Front, and Right faces, then twist the whole cube so the swap algorithm can be done, then twist the whole cube back to undo the setup move. When I say setup move what I mean is moving the ... nevermind, do I really want to develop an extravagant vocabulary to describe this process?