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Welcome to my Rubik's Cube and other puzzle method development website. My name is Michael James Straughan and I commonly go by the username Athefre. Most of my developments and ideas will be described here. Some of my developments are intended for speedsolving and some are interesting from a theory perspective. Some have even been used to set world records, such as EOLR and LEG-1. I have developed unique methods, steps, and techniques of my own and have also contributed to every popular method. Below are some examples.

Speed oriented developments:

Interesting and fun developments (that may also have speedsolving potential):

I am also the creator of cubinghistory.com. It is a website that provides the origin and development history of methods, steps, techniques, notation, hardware, and everything else. It is an in-depth collection of information from books from the 1970s and 1980s and internet posts. Some of the information completely changes what we thought was the true origin of certain subjects.

I joined the puzzle community in 2005 and experimented with the various methods which were around at the time. This included Waterman, Petrus, Roux, CFOP, Heise, and Human Thistlethwaite. In early 2006 I decided to use Roux as my first main speedsolving method. I started method development in 2006 with the creation of the MI1 method and Nautilus. A few years later I developed an easy to use recognition method for NMCLL then many developments branched from that. NMCLL led to NMLL, which led to the concept of Transformation, then A2, then ACMLL, and a few things in between. A major focus has been on pseudo, with the creation of various NMCLL recognition systems, development of 2x2 NMCLL, NMEG, A2, NMZBLL recognition, CCMLL recognition, ACxLL, Transformation, SL5C, and others.

I've thrown away thousands of ideas and only kept and developed the ones that stood out. Quality versus quantity is definitely important. Some things were developed with the intent for use in high level speedsolving (APB, Nautilus, EOLR). Some others are new concepts or are just for fun because they are unique and interesting. If any idea didn't feel competitive for speedsolving, wasn't unique or interesting enough, or didn't solve an existing problem in method development, I either threw the idea away or put it aside in case it can eventually be developed into something great.

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