# Coracle - Corner Lookahead Trainer



## Cride5 (May 19, 2010)

During F2L lookahead I often find myself looking at partially hidden corners (with two stickers visible) and hesitating to figure out what they are. Its something I've been trying to improve on, but its difficult to do on a physical cube ... so I decided to make an app for it.

http://cube.crider.co.uk/coracle.html

My PB so far: 28.64 (with NOU option set).


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## Athefre (May 19, 2010)

I've been wanting something like this for a long time but didn't have the programming knowledge to make it. Thanks.

EDIT: When I have it set to "NOU", sometimes it still gives U corners.


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## Cride5 (May 19, 2010)

Athefre said:


> I've been wanting something like this for a long time but didn't have the programming knowledge to make it. Thanks.
> 
> EDIT: When I have it set to "NOU", sometimes it still gives U corners.



Yup, when you set nou, it doesn't show any cases with U stickers visible, but you may still get corners belonging to the U-layer. I chose to do it like this because it keeps it like F2L lookahead. If you see a corner with no U or D sticker, you need to be able to establish whether or not the corner does in fact belong to the D-layer. These cases are the ones which often throw me off


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## Athefre (May 19, 2010)

Great idea, because if I saw for example Blue and Red, I immediately knew what corner it was. Adding some U corners in there forces me to reconsider.


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## Erik (May 19, 2010)

First try 24.47


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## koreancuber (May 19, 2010)

wow, harder than I thought. great program cride!


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## Sir E Brum (May 19, 2010)

Spoiler












My cube orientation was Yellow on top and Blue in front.
Neither of the cubies shown are possible solutions for the third color.
The actual solution of the unknown sticker is Red.




Spoiler











This time it is the exactly same case and I chose the right piece and it still says it should be YBR.


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## Cride5 (May 19, 2010)

Erik said:


> First try 24.47


Wow, pretty good .. I'd expect you could probably sub-10 it with a bit of practice. 
Are you using the keyboard controls ... and did you have any problems with image loading lag?



koreancuber said:


> wow, harder than I thought.


Yup, deffow is for me too 



Sir E Brum said:


> My cube orientation was Yellow on top and Blue in front.
> Neither of the cubies shown are possible solutions for the third color.
> The actual solution of the unknown sticker is Red.


Aah, thanks for pointing that out ... I had a hunch something was wrong a few times, but I thought it was must my n00b-ness. Turned out there was an error in a single digit of one of the case tables ... should be fixed now


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## Sir E Brum (May 19, 2010)

I also noticed that it registers selections when I press keys that were not mentioned in the keyboard controls.
Examples are:
T (DRF), Z (UFR), V (DLB), Y (URB)


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## Cride5 (May 19, 2010)

Should be working now...

Thanks for testing


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## Cride5 (May 20, 2010)

yaysub20 


Spoiler










EDIT: 17.77


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## InfernoTowel (Jun 2, 2010)

I'm still tryign to get better at F2L...can someone explain to me how to tell what colors a partially hidden corner is?


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## Sa967St (Jun 2, 2010)

InfernoTowel said:


> I'm still tryign to get better at F2L...can someone explain to me how to tell what colors a partially hidden corner is?


know your colour scheme


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## Sa967St (Jun 2, 2010)

Cride5 said:


> 17.77





Spoiler










This was after 10 tries or so.

edit:
5 or 6 tries later:


Spoiler










race to sub10, anyone?


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## Cride5 (Jun 2, 2010)

Sa967St said:


> 15.04



Wow, you're pretty good at this! Took me a good few hours of practice before I got sub-20


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## dillonbladez (Jun 2, 2010)

What's NOU stand for/mean?

edit:
this constant popup that says FAIL is kind of discouraging  lol


edit:

LOLOLOL YEAAAHHH ALMOST SUB-1 xD 1:02.73


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## Sa967St (Jun 2, 2010)

sub10 soon


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## CubesOfTheWorld (Jun 3, 2010)

Pretty good. It was harder than I thought.


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## jfly (Jun 3, 2010)

This sucks for people who don't know their color scheme.


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## InfernoTowel (Jun 3, 2010)

I know my color scheme fine, but the problem arises when I see, for example, a corner with green and red. How can I tell if the third color is white or yellow?


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## Tyrannous (Jun 3, 2010)

10 in 1:08:00 :fp


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## Konsta (Jun 3, 2010)

InfernoTowel said:


> I know my color scheme fine, but the problem arises when I see, for example, a corner with green and red. How can I tell if the third color is white or yellow?



With magic


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## ariasamie (Jun 3, 2010)

InfernoTowel said:


> I know my color scheme fine, but the problem arises when I see, for example, a corner with green and red. How can I tell if the third color is white or yellow?



that's not what i expected from a speedcuber :fp


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## ariasamie (Jun 3, 2010)

please explain about those NOU and L R D options.


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## FatBoyXPC (Jun 3, 2010)

There is a help link at the top of the page...


1:07:xx but I kept seeing fail. I first was misreading the inner squres (although I guess I should just learn the keyboard commands as it'd be easier, not to mention I'd probably not get confused as much).

Quite a useful app. Sarah what is your PB single and AO5 (Of the cube not this game)?


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## CuBeOrDiE (Jun 3, 2010)

this is difficult...


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## FatBoyXPC (Jun 3, 2010)

Very difficult. I obviously need work on my color scheme.


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## Sa967St (Jun 3, 2010)

fatboyxpc said:


> Sarah what is your PB single and AO5 (Of the cube not this game)?


7.xx, 9.9x
I use a different colour scheme though 



dillonbladez said:


> What's NOU stand for/mean?


NO U... face stickers are shown (no yellow stickers)



InfernoTowel said:


> *I know my color scheme fine*, but the problem arises when I see, for example, a corner with green and red. How can I tell if the third color is white or yellow?


Wat
You clearly don't know your colour scheme well if you're asking that question 

The white-red-green corner has those colours going in a clockwise direction and the yellow-red-green corner has those colours going in a counterclockwise direction.


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## StachuK1992 (Jun 3, 2010)

Erm, I like it...but can we possibly have a way to change color schemes? (I'm so rawr with my black instead of orange. heehee)


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## FatBoyXPC (Jun 4, 2010)

Also could we limit it to 4 corners? I realize getting better at all colors would be great, but if all I were to worry about would be my white faced corners, that cuts half of them out to learn. I guess if I wanted to be color opposite type neutral it'd benefit me to just suck it up and get good at all of them  But for now I'm focusing on white cross, so it'd be easier for me to just get good at those.

Or another good rhyme for the reason would be concentrate on say 2 corners, in various places on the cube you've provided, get good at recognizing those, I think recognition would get better quicker.


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## Cride5 (Jun 4, 2010)

Congrats on the sub-10 Sarah, you've raised the bar pretty high! 




Stachuk1992 said:


> Erm, I like it...but can we possibly have a way to change color schemes? (I'm so rawr with my black instead of orange. heehee)


Hmm well it is *possible* yes, but whether I have the time to do it is another question. I would hope to be able to do it, but programming wise I already have a very long list of things to do.

An easy way to do it would be to download the source and alter the colour shceme yourself. The patch would be to change line 60 so that the COLS variable uses a different list of colours. For example, at the moment it is set to: 'yrbwog', but you could change it to something like 'prbwog'. (see VisualCube documentation for an explanation of the colour codes).




fatboyxpc said:


> Also could we limit it to 4 corners? I realize getting better at all colors would be great, but if all I were to worry about would be my white faced corners, that cuts half of them out to learn. I guess if I wanted to be color opposite type neutral it'd benefit me to just suck it up and get good at all of them  But for now I'm focusing on white cross, so it'd be easier for me to just get good at those.
> 
> Or another good rhyme for the reason would be concentrate on say 2 corners, in various places on the cube you've provided, get good at recognizing those, I think recognition would get better quicker.



Reducing the range of possible corners would be about as useful as learning how to solve the dodo cube ... so no 

With regards your second request, this feature already exists. Try clicking on the L, R or D checkboxes.


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## InfernoTowel (Jun 4, 2010)

Sa967St said:


> InfernoTowel said:
> 
> 
> > *I know my color scheme fine*, but the problem arises when I see, for example, a corner with green and red. How can I tell if the third color is white or yellow?
> ...


That's exactly what I thought, but it seemed that there was a better method.


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## oprah62 (Jun 4, 2010)

j-fly said:


> This sucks for people who don't know their color scheme.



true


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## FatBoyXPC (Jun 4, 2010)

Cride after reading my post I realized I could access all those options with the L R D and NOU options. I think I just got burnt out on failing so hard. I thought I knew my color scheme (have no problem solving the centers correctly on bigger cubes) but apparently not as well as I need to. I'm hoping this improves my F2L lookahead quite a bit as I'm learning a lot.


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## Cride5 (Jun 4, 2010)

InfernoTowel said:


> Sa967St said:
> 
> 
> > InfernoTowel said:
> ...



The way I do it is to visualise how I would place the corner. It is always one of two options. If mentally placing it works then its the corner you think it is, if not then it's the 'other' one. To improve speed I also use reference points, so that I know how certain corners should look in each of the possible positions without having to mentally place them.

... that's how I do it, but then I'm not as fast as Sarah!


Another way to do it could be by imagining the corner is already placed and the colours which would surround it. It works for me, but is much slower.




fatboyxpc said:


> I'm hoping this improves my F2L lookahead quite a bit as I'm learning a lot.


Well if you weren't considering partially visible corners, then once you've mastered this you will be 'seeing' 3 times more corners than before!


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## FatBoyXPC (Jun 4, 2010)

I cheated and took Sarah's method of recognizing colors via cw/ccw patterns, it helped a lot! I finally got down to 44 seconds (but I don't play this back to back for hours, I played for about 10 minutes, watched a movie, played a bit, watched the new episode of burn notice, played again, etc).

I just typed a paragraph about how you could potentially use this same technique to train F2L (CFOP method), but then I realized that it'd just be best to solve the F2L on a cube. However your corner identification drill is totally awesome.


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## Feryll (Jun 7, 2010)

Bump, because this is awesome.

What I'm doing is that since my perspective for BLD is yellow on top, and orange in front, I am master at that corner. If the two colors are orange/red, or blue/green, and not yellow/white, I first imagine the corner going to the U layer if it's not already, and if it has orange/red on the right, I count that as one 'flaw'. If it has red or green in it, I count it as a 'flaw' also (both red and green on one corner is 2 flaws). If it has an even number of flaws, it is yellow on top. Otherwise, it's white. I have a brute-force checker in my head for cases where it has white or yellow visible. It's very intuitive and hard to explain.

My PB so far, from little training, is 22.31. I am also color neutral, so would that make it harder for me, as well as other CN people?


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## Sa967St (Jun 7, 2010)

fatboyxpc said:


> I cheated and took Sarah's method of recognizing colors via cw/ccw patterns, it helped a lot!


 I never said that that's the method I use 

Most of it is just gut-feeling actually. When white is one of the stickers that show up, I can just tell what colour the missing sticker is because only one of the two possibilities look right to me. I'm quite familiar with the colour scheme since I "memorized" it so I can inspect the cross faster. Only using one colour cross does have an advantage. 

The only time I use a real method is when white is not one of the stickers that show up. I know that when white is on D, the surrounding colours are green, orange, blue and red in that order from left to right. So if white is not one of the colours showing and the two colours don't "spell": GO, OB, BR or RG (pretending that the missing sticker is on D), then the missing sticker is yellow.


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## Boz (Jun 8, 2010)

yay, sub 10. Nice program Cride 
definately needed to use the keyboard to get this


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## Carrot (Jun 8, 2010)

damn... It sucks when it's wrong color scheme >.< (I have red-orange swapped )

EDIT: 23


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## Coisox (Jun 17, 2010)

wow! i just being wowed by ur VisualCube image generator and now i found this. at first i say to myself "what the hell this program is? got score, timer, and stuff". Then i simply clicking on all the images. After got wrong answer, then I know what this program for. My conclusion, ur program rocks and no help file needed 

p/s: if i want to suggest features for ur cTimer, where should it be?


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## Cride5 (Jun 17, 2010)

Heh, glad you like my programs 

The cTimer thread is here: http://www.speedsolving.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17078


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## XTowncuber (Aug 4, 2016)

21.81 first try...gonna practice a bit maybe.


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## PenguinsDontFly (Aug 4, 2016)

XTowncuber said:


> 21.81 first try...gonna practice a bit maybe.


19.85 
(followed by a bunch of DNFs)
It's funny how often I mess up on the yellow corners


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## samuelqwe (Aug 7, 2016)

*1:51.23*
Yeah, I still need a lot of work...

EDIT: *1:07.00* on second try
EDIT 2: Getting the hang of this. *45.23* on third try. Sub 1!


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## Jlvs2run (Jul 21, 2017)

This drill is awesome, and is helping me to visualize the corners much better. I used a cube the first few times to see the process. Using the keyboard with one hand helps a lot, as the bottom images were confusing.

To have all 72 positions, check the first 3 boxes and don't check the NOU box.

Results
1st day: 43.72
best time: *12.35* (72 positions)


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## Arc (Jul 22, 2017)

Any easy way to switch the color scheme around or am I going to have to meddle?


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## TDM (Jul 22, 2017)

Arc said:


> Any easy way to switch the color scheme around or am I going to have to meddle?


Conrad's got a solution here, in response to Stachu's question.


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## I_<3_SCS (Aug 5, 2017)

This is a nice tool!


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## santongding (Nov 14, 2022)

Hello. Could you please put this app on Github? Because I can‘t access the web from my region. Or I can only make a new one based on your VisualCube >_< Thanks in advance.


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## abunickabhi (Nov 15, 2022)

Been using this tool for several years, it has helped me improve no tilt blind tracing a lot and decrease my memo time for 3BLD.


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