Writings

Method Development Life Cycle: A guide to method development that explains development through a process similar to the software development life cycle. It covers formulating an idea, designing a method around it, analysis to determine if the method idea is good, development of the method, publication to the community, and continued maintenance of the method to ensure that it is kept up to date with modern algorithms, finger tricks, and techniques.

The Convergence of CFOP, Petrus, and More: A discussion about how the current most popular method used in competitions is a combination of CFOP, Petrus, ZBLS, and more. The article covers the history of each step and technique currently being used and why we should create a new method name separate from CFOP to distinguish the two.

Method Rigidity and Total Awareness Solving: Every current speed solving method is designed around the same idea. This idea is to solve groups of pieces until there are a few remaining, then work within the restrictions to finish the puzzle. This restricted movement in the final stages causes the move count of the solve to be very high in comparison to efficient computer solutions. So the idea that I have put forward is for everyone to search follow a new line of thinking. The new thought process should be to build methods around a concept that I'm calling Total Awareness Solving. A method following this concept will simultaneously consider every piece of the puzzle, accounting for each and influencing the entire puzzle in the most advantageous way. This will create a method that works like a deterministic system of cause and effect. A quote my Method Development Life Cycle article:

• "The final pieces to be solved sit around or within groups of already solved pieces. This means that turning movement is blocked and that the steps to solve the final pieces have to work within the restrictions caused by those previously solved pieces. In order to solve the final pieces, what was solved in previous steps must be broken to allow for freedom of movement for the unsolved pieces, then restored after solving those pieces. Solving in this way is like painting yourself into a corner, trekking across your work because you have no other choice, then fixing your mistakes afterward."

Corner Permutation Method History: I wrote a history of corner permutation (CP) use in methods. Ranging from its use in ZZ to the various CP first methods that were proposed over the years. This post was also responsible for the method merge that resulted in CEOR. The proposal in the main post was to consolidate each of the CP methods that had the same steps into a single method.

History of ZBLL Most in the community assume that ZBLL is a proposal or development from Zbigniew Zborowski and Ron van Bruchem. However, the fact is that the algorithm set already existed for the Petrus method and was developed by Bernard Helmstetter. Ron and Zbigniew had a goal of getting to an all edges oriented last layer in CFOP and so they created the steps of F2L-1, ZBLS, then solve the last layer in one step (overall called the ZB Method). They even specifically mention that they are using Bernard Helmstetter's development for the Petrus method. The community mistakenly named the oriented edges last layer subset ZBLL based on Ron and Zbigniew's ZB method. In this post I go over the history and why I think it may be a good idea to rename the subset.

The Legacy of Petrus: The Petrus method has been the most influential of all upon other methods. I wrote a post that covers the innovations that came from the Petrus method.