Various Thoughts

Sometimes people will say that a development is obvious. Their implication is that the discovery is unimportant or too simple for anyone to take credit for. But many of the great discoveries come from accidents or, when revealed to the public, the public says "it was right under our nose the whole time".

One example is when I published the idea of group referencing for Singmaster notation. We can reference an individual corner or edge by its intersecting layers, such as U, F, and R intersecting to point to the UFR corner. We can reference an individual sticker by saying that the first letter is the sticker that we are focused on, as in UFR being the U sticker of that corner or RFU being the R sticker. But it would also be helpful to be able to reference groups of pieces or stickers. That's where I introduced the idea of involving wide and slice turn notation in the references. ufr is the intersection of the wide u, f, and r layers and is the 2x2x2 block around the UFR corner. Ufr is the 1x2x2 block on the U layer around the UFR corner. Check the Steps & Concepts NBRS page for more. When I introduced this, there was someone who argued for a while that this something that anyone could have come up with or accidentally found by accidentally typing UFr instead of UFR then thinking about what UFr may mean. But that doesn't make the discovery any less important. Also, if it was so easy to discover by accident, why wasn't this something that the community was mass using sometime between Rubik's Cube's introduction in the late 1970s and 2010 when I first put the idea out there? The community wasn't using it before, but now many in the method development side of the community are using it since I introduced it.

Another example: In 2026 I developed an alternate version of Straughan recognition, one that is focused on checking the minimum number of stickers within a certain group of pieces. I developed a version of this for ZBLL multi angle recognition where cases are recognized using just the visible stickers in the UF and UR 1x1x3 bars. The UBL corner, and the LUF and BRU stickers are never involved. The reception to this develpment was sort of quiet. It felt like others were surprised that, instead of the common BH recognition that uses the UBL corner and many stickers, they could have been ignoring that corner the entire time for multi angle recognition and also using fewer stickers among the other pieces. One person claimed that it's "actually just common sense". If that's the case, why were there not already multi angle algorithm sheets that had the two main aspects of this new recognition method? Those two being to ignore the UBL corner and to use fewer stickers within the UF and UR bars than necessary.

What if, for a given puzzle, the method that everyone is using to break world records isn't actually the best, but the method being used just happens to be the one breaking the world records? Maybe everyone is using the same thing because everyone else is using it.

Let's say we create two 3x3 solving schools, each with 100 students. In one school, 99 students are taught CFOP and 1 is taught Roux. In the other school, 99 students are taught Roux and 1 is taught CFOP. It is likely that in the first school many CFOP users would be faster than the one student using Roux, and in the second school many of the Roux users would be faster than the one CFOP user. There is a higher chance of the more dedicated or talented individuals being among the 99 than being the 1. Is this what's happening within various puzzles? Is there an already developed method that could be faster, but is being mostly ignored because of the popular thing?

The defensive question then becomes "Well why is that one thing so popular?". Popularity is something that grows. Popularity breeds popularity. Once something grows to a very large size, it is extremely difficult to overcome. Most people when they see the success of a method, they want to join in and not be different or may be afraid that the less popular methods may be worse. After all, the popular thing must be the best thing right? But that isn't always the case. Just a small example: There was a time when the Mehta method was growing very fast in popularity. It became so popular that some of the most famous people in the community joined its Discord server, or even made videos about their belief that it could be the next big thing. This was all due to marketing (popularity growth) as I later proved. The popularity growth of that method popped when in December 2021 I posted a thread on speedsolving.com that compared Mehta, APB, Petrus, and other similar methods. It took a large amount of effort on my part, with an actual analysis, to change minds. And that's the big problem. We don't have good method analysis tools, in particular a robust system for analyzing ergonomics.

None of this is to say that any particular method for a particular puzzle is better than the currently popular one. For example, I don't believe that Roux is better than CFOP. I just sometimes consider that maybe if everyone would take a good look at other methods, maybe they would find that one is better than what they are currently using.