My Speedcubing Pages

Me setting a personal record on the Square-1 I speedcube. It all began on a fateful day in October '05 (actually, I can track it down to the 25th) when I found some paper on the mathematics of a Rubik's cube online, and decided to dig mine out from the back of the top-rightmost drawer in my Kommode, and then somehow decided to bring it to school the next day. One of my friends, Joseph Doolittle, knew how to solve it corners first. Then my friend Arthur found his cube. So we began looking for methods. He settled on simple F2L, while I tried corners first, edges first, Petrus, and finally: F2L. It took me until winter break to learn all the LL algorithms well enough. By that time, I had received a Square-1 from David Rendleman, and begun solving it, too (though it took forever to memorize the two-edge switcher). And so we learned... Ummon Karpe, a fellow second-violinist, also picked up on the trend. Well, he was already on it...
Then, somehow, we found out about the Caltech Winter competition at the Exploratorium, went there, and somehow came to signing up. We took four of the last five places, and I got a best of 1:02.27. So then it got going: Arthur bought a 2x2x2 at the competition, I got a 5x5x5; he then bought a 4x4x4, I got a Megaminx (I begged my Mom after seeing it at the competition), at some point I got a few 2 for $10 Walgreens promotion cubes (I knew I should have gotten six, not two; they were even arced...), then I got a Magic, and five more to build larger sustom versions, and on and on.... Arthur and I founded the Northgate High School Puzzle Club, and held an unofficial competition during one of the last weeks of school (It never finished, but due to the middle-3-of-5 average, no one could get ahead of me in the 3x3x3, the only event we got to). We're planning a Back-to-School competition.
Anyhow, I went to Nationals 2006. I managed to get to the semifinals in the 3x3x3, but had too many pops there. I did get third in Megaminx. And first in Square-1; I participated under German nationality, so I set a national record in average and single solve (if anyone disputes that, then I'm the current American champion instead) with a best time of 1:02.27 (does that time sound familiar?).
So now I average between 15-20 seconds for good 3x3x3 solves, with records of around 13-14 seconds, and 17.93 average. But who cares? Here's the content of my cubing subdomain:
  • Algorithms - a collection of tricks that you just might be able to use. I'll be adding many more. I'm also thinking about making an "Alg of the Week/Day" RSS/PHP kind of thing (see right below).
  • Algorithm of the Week - The algorithm of the week.
  • Big Cubes (4x4x4 and up).
    -----5x5x5 Last 2 Centers - Index of cases for right column in L2C.
  • Blindfolded solving - My blindfolded cubing pages.
    -----Speed BLD - My speed blindfolded pages
    -----General r2 - Full information for solving big cubes blindfolded using the r2/m2 methods.
    -----Freestyle - My BLD freestyle algs/comms.
  • CCT - CalCubeTimer, a popular Java timer written by Jeremy Fleischman and Ryan Zheng;
  • Compound OLL - A description of an OLL splitting idea.
  • Magic - A bit of (currently incomplete) directions for assembling Magics of different sizes, and a few patterns to put in.
  • Method History - How I used to solve a 3x3x3; an index of changes in my solving style.
  • MGLS - My speedcubing method; invented by Shotaro Makisumi and developed by me.
  • Probabilities - Interesting statistics on the scrambledness of a cube.
  • Records - My best times; it's hard to keep track for updating this.
  • Official Records - A link to my official times.
  • Square-1 animations of Lars Vandenbergh's Algorithms - A project to create visualizations of Square-1 algorithms. If you intend to use these a bit, I have a 24 MB zip file with every animation (so you can avoid loading each video temporarily). There are also a few .htm files with the animations embedded.
  • Tools - My tools directory.
  • Videos - Fast sequential image collages depicting me solving twisty puzzles.
    -----Fake Cubing Videos - My mocking videos.
  • YouTube - My YouTube channel; lots of cubing videos.