[Rastonbury]

Interesting to see the arguments against this by people familiar with cubing. Seems like the main one is that the cube is not fully solved during inspection phase, so they are also solving on the fly during the 2nd phase.

As a layperson, I think new category would be interesting, because they would require different approaches. It reminds me of that Tetris post on HN the other day where teenagers innovated new techniques of manipulating the controller to defeat the old guard, or speedrunners coming up with new techniques.

Also I'm curious as to why people don't use all the inspection time in something that's so competitively min-maxed. Spending more time to reduce one or two moves seems like something that could make or break it when you get ties measuring to 0.01s

[nsilvestri]

One reason people don't use all the time is because it gets exponentially more difficult to track more and more pieces as the solutions also get longer. An intermediate cuber can easily 4 pieces in inspection and plan out where they go within 15 seconds, but an additional 2 pieces might require them to spend an additional 45 seconds or more. At some point you recognize your limits and you can't do any better with the additional time and you just go.

[Rastonbury]

Ok that answers my question, so they solve it in 3 seconds after the first few move mainly based on instinct and experience?

[charcircuit]

>because they would require different approaches

No, but that would be true in the reverse situation if we were going the other way and no longer counting inspection since it adds the ability for new strategies and tricks to be integrated. By counting the inspection time the event devolves into just immediately doing what you see first and makes some strategies unviable.

>Also I'm curious as to why people don't use all the inspection time in something that's so competitively min-maxed

As the other reply mentioned the more moves you plan the harder it is to know the current state of the cube at the end of what you planned. There's also a difference between knowing the general position a piece will be in and knowing the exact position and orientation of pieces which is necessary for adding more moves for your plan.

[Rastonbury]

It becomes unviable for that event no inspection event only, definitely keep both events. I'm not familiar but I don't understand why it would "devolve" are you saying no one would bother to plan their moves and just start solving immediately? Is there no trade off where you flip the cube around to optimise for miniminimum inspection and solving time and totally forgo the inspection?

On the second point, it seems like there is more room to push the skill ceiling. Being more precise than general would give those cubers an edge in No inspection. I suppose this is like chess or poker where permutations of moves or hands are impossible to memorise for.

[charcircuit]

>Is there no trade off where you flip the cube around to optimise for miniminimum inspection and solving time and totally forgo the inspection?

There is not an interesting trade off. You just look to see if there's an obvious good start. Even with 15s of inspection you are usually only planning like 10% of the solve. The majority of the solve is already figured out on the fly.

>On the second point, it seems like there is more room to push the skill ceiling.

Yes, being able to accurately and quickly track pieces under time pressure is a skill.

[Rastonbury]

Thanks for the insight