# BLD Megaminx



## KrO2 (Oct 10, 2010)

I couldn't find information on this topic on the Internet very easily because it seems kind of specialized, so I'm asking here instead.
I recently learned 3OP for the cube, and wanted to learn to do the Megaminx. Can anyone tell me how I should do the restricted setup moves? Simply saying that the F and B faces must be double turns clearly doesn't apply to the dodecahedron.


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## cincyaviation (Oct 10, 2010)

KrO2 said:


> I couldn't find information on this topic on the Internet very easily because it seems kind of specialized, so I'm asking here instead.
> I recently learned 3OP for the cube, and wanted to learn to do the Megaminx. Can anyone tell me how I should do the restricted setup moves? Simply saying that the F and B faces must be double turns clearly doesn't apply to the dodecahedron.


I believe most people do Megaminx BLD with commutators and setup moves, you could probably orient corners and edges in some way that would make setups easier, but it would be difficult to get it to a certain restriction.


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## number1failure (Oct 11, 2010)

This would be very interesting to see. I don't even yet own a megaminx, but I'm getting one very soon, and may learn to solve it before 3x3 CFOP. But I can't put off CFOP any longer, I've already put it off too long. Sorry for the off-topic post, I get carried away sometimes.


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## KrO2 (Oct 11, 2010)

cincyaviation said:


> I believe most people do Megaminx BLD with commutators and setup moves, you could probably orient corners and edges in some way that would make setups easier, but it would be difficult to get it to a certain restriction.


I guess that makes sense, which simplifies the original question to what those setup moves might be. There must be some way of setting it up so that the algorithms won't change the orientations if people who know what they're doing use 3OP for the Megaminx.


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## cincyaviation (Oct 11, 2010)

Well the problem is i seriously doubt anyone has ever used 3OP for megaminx BLD, if i were you i would send a PM to Mike Hughey, he's done it blindfolded and would know as much about it as anyone else in the world.


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## hawkmp4 (Oct 11, 2010)

http://www.stefan-pochmann.de/spocc/blindsolving/megaminx/

http://sites.google.com/site/permuteramera/special/old-p-bld


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## blah (Oct 11, 2010)

Now try to do an edge commutator.


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## mr. giggums (Oct 11, 2010)

blah said:


> Now try to do an edge commutator.


 
[(RL') F (R'L) DR' (RL') F2' (R'L) , U]

EDIT: This is DR


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## qqwref (Oct 11, 2010)

There is no good way to talk about edge or corner orientation on a megaminx. You will have to solve the pieces directly (orientation and permutation at once).


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## yoruichi (Oct 11, 2010)

lol theres no such thing as orientation
its just a thing people made to make blind solving tuffer


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## Mike Hughey (Oct 11, 2010)

Actually, I'm thinking it's not necessarily such a crazy idea. There is no good way to talk about orientation, but you can always make something up. Once you came up with a way to designate orientation, now you would have just 20 corners and 30 edges, having to store orientation and location separately on them.

Clearly it's more work, but my biggest problem with megaminx BLD was that I couldn't find a decent way to memorize it. There are 60 sticker locations for both edges and corners, so it doesn't fit well into using alphabet letter pairs to hold two pieces. I used a letter pair to store each piece, which was wasteful and hard. I assigned a letter A to L for the face, and then assigned a letter within that face A to E to designate the particular sticker. If you went with orient-permute, now you can almost fit all the permutation possibilities in a single letter (perhaps add a few digits to get past Z, and ignore the buffer location?). It would be more work, but maybe it would make memorizing so much easier that it would compensate. For me, at least.

I know István overcame the problem by using multiple alphabets. That's probably the better approach, ultimately. But I am sufficiently intrigued by this that I might give it a try, if I can tear myself away from my square-1s long enough to do it.  (My batch of square-1s is supposed to arrive today!)


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## Pitzu (Oct 11, 2010)

qqwref said:


> orientation and permutation at once


 It's the best for any puzzle. :tu Even for cubes.
I have never understood what "orientation" means in blindsolving.  However in a 3 dimensional space we can speak about "orientation" for cubic puzzles, but what on Earth "orientation" means in Megaminx?! :confused:


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## Mike Hughey (Oct 11, 2010)

Pitzu said:


> I have never understood what "orientation" means in blindsolving.  However in a 3 dimensional space we can speak about "orientation" for cubic puzzles, but what on Earth "orientation" means in Megaminx?! :confused:


 
It's really the same as with cubic puzzles - "proper orientation" means whatever you want it to mean. We simply arbitrarily pick a direction as "correct". For cubes, it's obvious what that orientation that can be. For megaminx, we just have to work harder to come up with something.

I could see something like saying that a piece is properly oriented if it points in the direction of the closer of the top or bottom faces, or if vertical, clockwise from pointing that direction. I don't know; it's just a first pass, but surely it would be easy to manufacture an idea for "proper orientation".

Make no mistake about it - I'm convinced that separate orient and permute steps are bound to be substantially less efficient for megaminx BLD. However, with my particular personal problems memorizing a megaminx, I can see where it might not be a bad tradeoff to sacrifice that, which is why I'm tempted to try it. (I doubt it will get me fast enough to compete with you, though, István - last I saw you can solve 2 in the time it takes me to solve just 1.)


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## KrO2 (Oct 12, 2010)

With the cube, I thought the point of orientation was to make sure the pieces are facing the right way after the setup moves are undone, since it'll obviously be a different piece in that position, but I don't see how that could work at all on a dodecahedron. The setup moves might move one edge piece 2 rotations and another 3, and there's no way to differentiate that, since "only even rotations" is absolutely meaningless. That's probably just me misunderstanding it, though.

I decided to give in and switch to a method that already exists for Megaminx, specifically this one. The original Pochman method makes more intuitive sense to me this time around than 3OP did, so I'll probably use it for the cube as well. Although, the wiki explanation did say the idea is to use 2-cycles, but those algorithms it's showing are all 3-cycles. Is there a Megaminx move like the T-permutation that only switches two edges and to corners adjacent to one of the edges? When I try the T-permutation on the Megaminx it changes more than that.


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## irontwig (Oct 12, 2010)

No, you can't swap two corners and two edges on the megaminx, you can however swap two pairs of edges or two pairs of corners.


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## Stefan (Oct 12, 2010)

KrO2 said:


> those algorithms it's showing are all 3-cycles.


 
Wrong. Don't ignore the introduction text in the "_Solving pieces to the slave buffers_" section:



the page you linked to said:


> You can *solve almost all pieces using only the X algs*. The only exeption is when the piece to solve belongs to one of the slaves.


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## KrO2 (Oct 12, 2010)

Oh. Thanks; I guess that's what I get for missing something that important. :fp
In that case, I suppose I'll try doing the cube with the X algorithms instead of T-permutations as well, so I can keep it to one method. Assuming, of course, that that works; I could see it interfering with the setup moves quite a bit on the cube.


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## Sakarie (Oct 12, 2010)

I must admit I couldn't stop thinking of a Megaminx memo-method I could handle, and I think I've decided that when (because someday I will) I try megaminx, I'll assign every face a consonant, BDGJKLMNPRST, and the different conrners/edges would get a wovel AEIOU (Like A is always the top red corner, E is the 2 o'clock corner, and so on), and the memo would be like TEGA JULE FERO, everything will probably be pronouncable, and therefore a bit easier than just random letters. This would make about 2*(20+30)=100 letters, but if I only memorize well enough, that wouldn't be a big problem. Everything will go into a memory-journey of course. ('Cause that's what I always do.)


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