We’ve got a new way to race rubik’s cube solving. The old way was just to have everyone start solving at the same time and keep track of the order people finished in. That’s not near an even race with six or seven people, so the order of finishing was mostly set before it started. Now we’re doing relay solving, where we split into two teams and the teams race each other, solving in sequence.
Friday at the end of the day was my first chance to join in the fun. I suspect the teams would have been more balanced (or at least easier to balance) with Jeremy there instead of me like it’s been the previous times they raced like that, but the first round was pretty close. The most entertaining part was when Ryan showed up in the lab with the cube transport, meaning he had a lunchbox with everyone’s cube in it so nobody would have to walk through the halls just carrying a rubik’s cube. I always take my backpack to work and carry my cube (and lunch) in that.
I don’t feel like my rubik’s cube times have been improving lately because my timed runs (of which there haven’t been all that many) haven’t come close to my best time or even consistently faster than my 3 of 5 average. On the other hand, my average seems to be approaching my 3 of 5 average very slowly, so eventually I’ll probably get lucky and beat it if I do enough solves.
My efficiency is improving on my slow solves at least, and I’ve had several solves where I made less than 60 moves. If I could just learn to spot things faster I might be able to use move optimizations for speed.