Speedcubing

What is speedcubing?

Speedcubing is the sport of solving Rubik's Cubes (and related puzzles) as fast as possible--oftentimes in under 20 seconds.

My story

I first learned how to solve the cube when I was pretty young, probably in elementary school, using a fairly intuitive "swap point" method that my brother taught me (you may have seen or heard of it, though it's not that popular). I actually still use this method when I'm trying to make patterns, since it helps me think about things on a more intuitive level and since it solves less pieces at a time.

Fast-forward to high school, when I ran into Shotaro "Macky" Makisumi at ARML, a high school math competition. That was the first encounter I had with actual speedcubing, and that inspired me to start learning and getting faster. I got a new cube to replace my busted one.

A few years later I was in my prime, and had finally achieved a consistent sub-20 average, something I had strived to attain for a long time. I had gone to a couple of tournaments,

After that, my interest and motivation started to decline, and with nothing really else to push me (competitions didn't really interest me, I wasn't a big fan of the community, I was perfectly happy with my speed, and I didn't have all that much interest in other aspects besides 3x3x3 speedsolves), I just started to do less cubing in general. I've now declared myself officially retired from speedcubing, and although I still have a lot of the skills I used to, I'm in pretty bad form and I don't think I could get a sub-20 average without working at it. Sub-20 solves, maybe, but definitely not an average. Interestingly enough, I stopped roughly at around the same time (mid 2008-ish) that I started getitng into TGM, and the two have sort of swapped as dominating hobbies in my life. I'm much more happy with TGM though, and I think I'll stick with it longer. =)

My method

My 3x3x3 method went through various evolutions throughout my cubing career, but its final form was basically a form of the Fridrich method, with some other miscellaneous tricks thrown in--most notably Partial LL Edge Control and COLL.

The majority of my OLL algs came from Macky's site, while the majority of my PLL algs came from Katsu's site. I learned COLL mostly from Dan Harris' COLL page, but it seems to have been taken down.

My algorithms

All of my cubing algorithms are available in this handy doc that I've compiled:

DDRKirby(ISQ)'s Alg Repository

This includes OLL, PLL, and COLL, with multiple algs for a few cases (mostly the ones where I know two that are very comparable in speed, so I just use whichever one happens to not require a (u) or U). Note that I use (r)(u)(f) notation instead of xyz notation, like some Japanese cubers do, because I can never remember what x y and z are.

2x2x2

My 2x2x2 method is not very efficient, as it's essentially a reduced form of my 3x3x3 method (there are other much quicker ways to solve a 2x2x2). This means I solve the first layer (mainly intuitive) and then usually use COLL to solve the last layer in one step (though, if I get the sune or antisune case, I don't know the COLL, so it becomes a 2-step LL). This method was enough to get me 3rd place at US Nationals 2006, but I think that's just because there weren't that many other people who really knew 2x2x2 there.

4x4x4

Unlike most cubers, I do -not- use the centers first method for solving 4x4x4.

My method is fairly unique, but it is essentially a modification of Masayuki Akimoto's columns first method. His site didn't really go into the solution in that much detail (and isn't up anymore), and IIRC some of the listed algorithms were actually incorrect, but he did manage to get pretty fast times with it (sub-80 average). He probably also had a lot of optimizations and tricks that he never explained. I think I would probably be faster if I instead learned centers first like everyone else, but it's more interesting to be using something that's unique--even more unique than the Lars Petrus method for 3x3x3!

Other events

I kind of sucked at 3x3x3 blindfolded. I knew how to do it, but my memorization just wasn't good enough and I didn't practice enough to get any sort of consistency. At ALL.

I was pretty bad at one-handed too. I suffered from one-handed amnesia, meaning that I couldn't remember all my regular algs when I'm solving one-handed (because they're ingrained into my subconscious muscle memory as two-handed motions), so sometimes I was forced to use a 4-look LL instead of OLL->PLL! Needless to say, this was horrible for my one-handed times...

My 5x5x5 method is roughly the same as my 4x4x4 method, only...a lot slower. =p

I have a few Magics lying around, but I don't really use them that much. I'm not that great at Magic either.

There's also a bunch of other twisty puzzles (Square-One, Skewb, Pyraminx, etc.) that either me or my brother own, but I never really took the time to learn how to solve any of them.

In summary, I was good at 3x3x3, "okay" at 2x2x2 and 4x4x4, and I pretty much sucked at everything else. Of course, nowadays cubers have gotten a LOT better, so I don't even know if I can consider my 3x3x3 skills to have been "good" anymore.

Records

You can see my current personal speedcubing records on my Records page.

My official tournament results are online at the World Cube Association site here.

I also probably have some other unofficial records up on speedcubing.com, but those might be outdated.

Custom cubes

See the page on my custom cubes.