Be willing to feel like an idiot

The first time in cubing I really learned something hard was when I learned F2L.

In 2012 (whoa that's a long time ago) my PB was 36, and I still used the beginner method. I knew some stupid form of F2L, as kids tend to learn their own (worse) versions of things either out of laziness or impatience. I finally buckled down and learned proper F2L, and pretty quickly my times started dropping. Within a few weeks I already had a sub-30 PB single. This was probably the last time I felt utterly stupid when trying to do stuff on a cube, until recently.

In December 2019, I decided to get better at blindfolded. My PB was around 1:10, and my average was around 1:40 on a good day. That sounds pretty good for not really caring about blind, but I knew how to do this since 2013 and I had been practicing somewhat since 2014. So the level I reached was sort of expected. I used the Old Pochmann (OP) method for corners, which is just the beginner method. For edges I used M2.

So I started practicing without learning a new method. There was a competition soon and I wanted to do well, and learning a new method would probably mean doing poorly for a while. Plus, I just wanted to be decent at blind, like sub-1 minute. I didn't need to be amazing, I just wanted to be good by my standards without working too hard.

I started by making a spreadsheet of letter pair images so I could practice memorizing faster. That was the main problem: I took way too much time and mental energy thinking of what each letter pair would represent. For example, is CK supposed to be cake, crack, clock, etc.? The spreadsheet really helped with consistency and speed. But recalling images, getting them wrong, and then looking it up in the sheet, was REALLY tiring.

When I finally did it, I averaged around 1:10 (my former PB single!) and my new PB single was 50. I thought I'd just be happy with that and go back to my old events, but for some reason I just really wanted to be a lot better. Maybe I had finally gotten a taste of hard brain work, and decided that just a little more wouldn't be to bad. I knew I could be way better than I was.

So I took the plunge and started learning 3-style. If you don't know what it is, I can describe it in 2 ways:

1. 3-Style is a method that uses repeated 3-cycles (swapping around 3 pieces at once). You visualize which 3 pieces need to swap, and do an intuitive sequence of moves (commutator) to solve it.

2. 3-Style is a method that has 378 algorithms for corners, and 440 algorithms for edges.

With explanation 1, learning 3-Style sounds just like learning F2L. With explanation 2, it sounds like learning ZBLL twice, or learning OLL 14 times, or learning PLL 39 times (not fun). It's a lot easier to focus on the 2nd version and convince yourself that it's too hard, rather than accept feeling dumb for a while as if you were learning F2L all over again.

So, back to my story. I thought 3-style would be incredibly difficult (like explanation 2), but I would at least tackle 3-style corners to see what it's like. After all, solving 2 pieces at once is a huge upgrade over the beginner method.

I was shocked. After 3 weeks, I technically learned around 150 algs, and I knew them all well. But it only felt like I knew around 10-15, since they were all so intuitive. For comparison, it took me about the same amount of time to learn EG-1 for 2x2, which is about 40 algs. Plus, I messed them up all the time, confused them with each other, and kept forgetting them.

I realized at that moment how easy 3-style might be. Obviously not that easy, but way easier than I thought.

It was time to see what 3-style edges was all about. 3-style edges was scarier than corners for a few reasons. Instead of 1 type of intuitive commutator, there are 3 possible types you can use. This means that for each case, I would have to pick between 3 methods of solving it instead of having 1 option forced on me. Also, the benefit of using 3-Style edges is smaller than the benefit of using 3-style corners, since M2 is already a great edges method. Lastly, there are 440 cases instead of 378.

After 3 days, I learned 80 commutators. They were the easy ones, but still. 80!!!

It's worth mentioning that I'm not calling them "algorithms", the same way you wouldn't count R U' R' U R U R' as an "algorithm" that you use for F2L. Even if you can do it instantly and without thinking, it's still intuitive and you can't really forget it. 3-Style is almost completely intuitive commutators. Commutators are less intuitive than F2L pairings at first. But like with F2L, the more cases you know, the more intuitive each new case will feel.

With each new type of commutator I had to get used to, it would be a huge internal struggle:

1. Try and fail to think of memory tricks for how I can do this quickly and with little thinking.

2. Try to think of good alternatives because I don't like this comm.

3. Accept it, get used to it, and get good at it through repetition.

Then I'd be happy to apply that knowledge to new situations. I hadn't felt like this in a while; learning something completely new in an unstructured manner. It made me feel dumb, and my brain kept wanting to reject it. But each time I moved forward, and also took naps because I kept getting tired.

If I came across a case I didn't know, I would just try to figure it out without help, before looking up the optimal solution. I can't tell you how many times I had to re-figure out the "OL" pair, but it was at least 15 times for that pair alone. Multiply that by... a lot.

I thought having to deal with 3 types of comms for edges would be confusing. Turns out, it just made things easier. Instead of doing crazy setup moves because it's a bad case (like for corners), I can just choose a different type of commutator that works much more easily. For example, 4-move edge comms tend to work best when the pieces are all oriented the same way or are far apart. Interchange comms tend to work when they are oriented in different ways or close together.

I wanted a really structured way of learning, and that's what I used for corners. But for edges, as it turns out, the best way was just to jump in blind (ha, get it?) and feel like an idiot for a while. That's the same way people learn F2L. I didn't want to feel that way, or take such a "stupid" approach, but I feel like this experience poked so much at my unwillingness to be uncomfortable, that I may just be entirely better off for doing this; not just within the context of cubing.

Here's where I am now. It has been around 2 months, and I know all of 3-style edges (not fully optimized, but pretty good) and about 70% of 3-style corners (the 70% that I do know are pretty damn optimized). Out of those 2 months, only 2 weeks were spent on learning 440 edge comms (I even spent about 4 days of that time not learning the very last alg because I got lazy). The rest were spent on learning corner comms + practicing actual solves.

The next hard part was to actually get fast at doing this. F2L took a long time with 77 possible cases, so obviously with 440 it would take way longer! Except... it didn't. Pretty much a week after learning 3-style edges, I broke my 40 second PB with 38 seconds. I'm still not amazing at it, but I'm getting there.

Currently I'm still working on 3-style corners. I took a ZBLL-style approach to learning 3-style corners, and it's been slow and steady. Each alg I learn I tend to be pretty good at using right away in solves. I definitely carry an intuitive element of it with me as I execute the alg, but there is still a ton of brute force memorization I'm doing.

With 3-style edges, I took a fully intuitive F2L-style approach and I now know 6 edge algs (special cases). The rest of the cases are all intuitive, and yes, I make up every comm intuitively every single solve, so I don't actually carry 440 algs in my head. Some of them are starting to feel like algs, but for now I'll have to just keep executing them fast and wait for them to feel more automatic.

For some reason my brain really likes to reject the idea of hard work that I can't yet measure. Not objectively immeasurable hard work, just work that I haven't learned the true extent of; work that is unpredictable. I do tons of hard work once I get into things, but I don't know why there's something inside me that doesn't want to look at anything I don't fully understand. I've probably been held back in my improvement in other things because of this.

But now for the first time in a long time, I've really recognized it. And as uncomfortable as it is, I'm taking no shortcuts. I recently learned of a thing called "breaking into flipped edges", and I hate it with a passion. Instead of simply doing a fast alg + an okay alg, you do a ton of thinking to solve the same case with a fast alg + a fast alg instead. Of course it's slow as crap for me right now, but I guarantee you I'll be good at it soon. Maybe the old me would have settled for the okay alg.