# Moves per second is way more important than total moves



## cubo (Sep 7, 2016)

OK so here's my thinking:

Consider the beginner cuber who averages 100 seconds per solve, taking an average 100 moves.

Now consider a top speed cuber who averages 10 seconds per solve, taking an average 50 moves.
What has contributed to their x10 speed improvement? 
The halving in total moves (from 100 to 50) has been a x2 factor, but the improved moves per second (from 1 to 5) is a x5 factor!

I think this simple observation is interesting for a few reasons:

It indicates that the focus of development should be on more 'fluid' algs using finger tricks to ramp up your speed, rather than learning more efficient but 'difficult' algs, and ultimately -- practice practice practice!
It also suggests that generally, given a 'fewer but slower' vs 'more but faster' moves scenarios, the latter is a clear preference if lower times are your goal. 

A side question it raises regards this trade off: Does 'fewer' moves in fact always involve a speed trade off? Clearly lowering move count helps lower times up to a point, but when does this focus on move efficiency become a diminishing return?

Lastly, it suggests sub-20 times are possible with beginner methods. 
Interested in others thoughts on this.


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## Matt11111 (Sep 7, 2016)

What you're talking about is actually a measurement that some cubers use. It's called Turns Per Second (TPS). There are some people who will work on improving their TPS while others may spend that same time learning algs.


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## cubo (Sep 7, 2016)

Matt11111 said:


> There are some people who will work on improving their TPS while others may spend that same time learning algs.


 Hi Matt, thanks! I think you can work on both ... but one will give you much more improvement


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## Daniel Lin (Sep 7, 2016)

you're right-TPS is more important than efficiency for beginners. However once you get to a certain level, the amount of effort you put into efficiency pays off more. World class cubers (like Feliks) are so fast that it's hard for them to improve their TPS/lookahead, so they need to be efficient as well(xcrosses/ F2L tricks)



cubo said:


> A side question it raises regards this trade off: Does 'fewer' moves in fact always involve a speed trade off? Clearly lowering move count helps lower times up to a point, but when does this focus on move efficiency become a diminishing return?


By "efficient" we usually mean "speed optimal". If you know ZBLL, the algs are not movecount optimal (usually ~4 more moves on average), but they are speed optimal, so learning them obviously won't make you slower(than with OCLL+PLL).


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## cubo (Sep 7, 2016)

Daniel Lin said:


> you're right-TPS is more important than efficiency for beginners. However once you get to a certain level, the amount of effort you put into efficiency pays off more. World class cubers (like Feliks) are so fast that it's hard for them to improve their TPS/lookahead, so they need to be efficient as well(xcrosses/ F2L tricks)


 Yes agree, to reach world class times you must be fast and efficient. But remember, 99.9% of cubers are not going to reach world class level. I know I'm not  

Of course almost every cuber who tries to get faster will make improvements to their move count by learning a few more algs, as well as getting faster with their TPS through practice. For many, that transition will include learning F2L and possibly going from 4LLL to 3-look LL or 2-look LL. My main point is that improving your TPS is significantly more important to lowering your speed than the better algs you are learning. Not saying you shouldn't learn the algs, but just be aware of where the real gains come from. 

For me this all comes from soul-searching my Rubik's goals, which are probably much more modest compared to many here, and contemplating the best way to get myself there. And realizing the way (for me) lies in developing hand speed, fluidity & fingertricks, as the most effective way to get faster compared to learning lots of algs. I know this ultimately limits me, but another of my points is that I think it limits me way less than you might think (see my last comment about sub-20 using beginners). 



Daniel Lin said:


> By "efficient" we usually mean "speed optimal". If you know ZBLL, the algs are not movecount optimal (usually ~4 more moves on average), but they are speed optimal, so learning them obviously won't make you slower(than with OCLL+PLL).


Sorry for my bad terminology - I was using "efficient" to purely mean "lower move count" but I understand what you mean that algs can be "speed efficient" yet "move inefficient" - that's what I call 'fluid' algs, the ones that just feel right and you can do faster than others even if it takes a couple of extra moves. I'm all about that.


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## mark49152 (Sep 7, 2016)

You haven't accounted for pauses. Time = (move count / TPS) + pauses. In that 100 second beginner solve, they probably aren't moving at all for 70 seconds of it.

You could argue that overall TPS for the solve accounts for pauses, but by TPS people usually mean speed when you are actually moving, and that's a more useful definition because the fact is that increasing finger speed and decreasing pauses are two very different aims involving different techniques and practice. 

The consensus seems to be that decreasing pauses is way more important than TPS, hence all the advice on the forums about turning slow and looking ahead.


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## Ranzha (Sep 7, 2016)

Just be fluid
You don't need crosses
You don't need tps
You don't need rotationless F2L or all your PLLs to be sub-1
Just solve yo and you could average 12 like meeeeeeeeeeeee


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## cubo (Sep 7, 2016)

mark49152 said:


> You haven't accounted for pauses. Time = (move count / TPS) + pauses. In that 100 second beginner solve, they probably aren't moving at all for 70 seconds of it.
> 
> You could argue that overall TPS for the solve accounts for pauses, but by TPS people usually mean speed when you are actually moving, and that's a more useful definition because the fact is that increasing finger speed and decreasing pauses are two very different aims involving different techniques and practice.
> 
> The consensus seems to be that decreasing pauses is way more important than TPS, hence all the advice on the forums about turning slow and looking ahead.


 Interesting point, thanks Mark! 

I have a few thoughts on this: 

That estimate of 70 percent pause for a beginners solve is surely way too high? That would mean they were effectively making 100 turns in 30 seconds, or 3.33 TPS, which is a very fast for a beginner. I would think the inverse is closer to reality: 30 percent pause, 70 percent moving. Even that seems a bit high (on pausing). My pausing feels closer to 20 percent, but I'd need to do some tests to check more closely. In fact I will do that because I'm very curious now. 

EVEN SO if it's 20 percent that's still clearly a significant factor I hadn't accounted for in my OP, so thanks again. Let's use that 20% estimate to re-do my example and see what happens: 

Beginner who solves in 100 seconds with 100 moves and 20 seconds of pauses. That now makes a TPS of 1.25 (100/80).

Top speed cuber who solves in 10 secs with 50 moves and 0 second pauses. That makes a TPS of 5 (50/10). 

Note: top speed cubers may pause more than this, but this would only strengthen my point so I'm being generous 
So now our tweaked breakdown of improvement factors (total x10) is now:

TPS improvement: x4 (from 1.25 to 5)

Move reduction: x2 (from 100 to 50)
Pause reduction: x1.25 (from 100 to 80)
As you see, even if we introduce pausing to the mix, TPS still emerges as the most important of our 3 factors, by a wide margin.


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## shadowslice e (Sep 7, 2016)

I'm pretty sure this is exaggerating at least a little bit. Even at non-world class level, I'm pretty sure that efficiency is very important. My average tps is somewhere in the range of 4-5 tps yet I'm verging on sub-11. I would say that my tps is more charicteristic of 15 second solver- where do I get the boost? Efficiency. I probably have the same if not slower tps that @Berd yet am still a fair bit faster now (just as a 3x3x3 comparison). Also note that @Berd is by no means an inefficient solver (at least for a CFOPer and doesn't spam tps either)

This is also similar to the difference between Alex Lau and Feliks Zemdegs (just as a side note, I'm talking about a couple of years ago when Alex actually practised and both averaged 7s). If tps is as important as you are making it, Feliks should have crushed Alex in every way possible turning about 1.5 times as fast. However, Alex was one of the most efficient solvers ever so his lower movecount allowed him to keep pace.

Similarly, in recent years, it seems at a cursory glance that feliks' tps has not increased as dramatically as his averages suggest but his efficiency has increased more in line.

Also, I think you need to define "more important". If you mean that it improves the most, I wouldn't neccesarily disagree with you. However, if you have (for example) feliks do a beginner solve, it would likely take him around 15-20 seconds but if you took Alex doing slow turning, he could likely get faster times than that with far lower tps.

Just as a final point, IMO, lookahead is perhaps the single most important part of speedsolving as it helps you to reduce pauses, increase lookahead and increase efficiency.


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## AlphaSheep (Sep 7, 2016)

cubo said:


> Interesting point, thanks Mark!
> 
> I have a few thoughts on this:
> 
> ...


Seriously, you'd be surprised. There are so many micro pauses you don't even notice.

I film some of my solves now so I can see my pauses. In a 18 second solve, it seems I typically spend about 12 seconds turning and 6 seconds on pauses. That's already over 30%. 

When I was averaging around a minute, if I spammed random moves (say R U R' U' over and over) as fast as I could, I could easily reach 5 moves per second. I'm now sub-20 and I can only reach around 7 turns per second. (I know, my turn speed is slower than younger cubers)

I don't know what percentage of my solves were pauses as a beginner, but 70% doesn't sound unreasonable.


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## mark49152 (Sep 7, 2016)

cubo said:


> That estimate of 70 percent pause for a beginners solve is surely way too high?


As @AlphaSheep said, you'd be surprised. What feels like a tiny pause when you're solving looks much longer if you watch it back in a video.

A couple of years ago we did some experiments in the older cubers' thread. We timed a solve, then practised the same scramble a few times and timed again. The solution remains the same, TPS doesn't get faster, but since we know what cases are coming next, there are way fewer pauses. I don't remember the exact results but roughly we were seeing 20 second initial solves come down to 13-14 seconds, meaning that even at 20 seconds about 30% of time is spent paused. That's also consistent with what I see when I watch videos of my solves.

Remember the "turn slower and look ahead" advice is usually aimed at solvers at about that level. That advice is irrelevant to 100 second solvers. Down to about 30s it's really about basic competence in solving, like not screwing up and not spending several seconds recognising each case.

If anything, I think for a 100 second solver it's probably higher than 70% pauses.


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## cubo (Sep 7, 2016)

Hey @shadowslice e


shadowslice e said:


> I'm pretty sure this is exaggerating at least a little bit. Even at non-world class level, I'm pretty sure that efficiency is very important. My average tps is somewhere in the range of 4-5 tps yet I'm verging on sub-11. I would say that my tps is more charicteristic of 15 second solver - where do I get the boost? Efficiency. I probably have the same if not slower tps that @Berd yet am still a fair bit faster now (just as a 3x3x3 comparison). Also note that @Berd is by no means an inefficient solver (at least for a CFOPer and doesn't spam tps either)


What is spam TPS?

On TPS vs efficiency, it's just maths  All other things being equal, 20% faster TPS or doing 20% fewer moves will both result in 20% faster times. IN your case, if you have the same TPS as a 15 second solver but do it in 11 seconds, then yes, you must be more efficient (about 27% in fact). This efficiency can only come from fewer moves or fewer pauses between algs.



shadowslice e said:


> This is also similar to the difference between Alex Lau and Feliks Zemdegs (just as a side note, I'm talking about a couple of years ago when Alex actually practised and both averaged 7s). If tps is as important as you are making it, Feliks should have crushed Alex in every way possible turning about 1.5 times as fast. However, Alex was one of the most efficient solvers ever so his lower movecount allowed him to keep pace.


 Yes sure. If Felix in fact moved 1.5 times as fast as Alex, then Alex must have been correspondingly more efficient. It's a direct trade off. But this doesn't alter my point that overall, there is 'more' of TPS improvement to trade off. TPS can make a bigger impact because you can improve your TPS way more than you improve your move efficiency. From 100 moves in 100 seconds you can only get about 60% more move efficient (from 100 to a 40-move solve) but you can get 500%+ more efficient by improving your TPS (from 1 to 5+). 



shadowslice e said:


> Also, I think you need to define "more important". If you mean that it improves the most, I wouldn't neccesarily disagree with you.


Yes, I mean that, on the journey from 100-second beginner to 10-second advanced cuber, it is TPS which mathematically makes the biggest contribution to your improvement (in clocking faster times).



AlphaSheep said:


> Seriously, you'd be surprised. There are so many micro pauses you don't even notice.
> 
> I film some of my solves now so I can see my pauses. In a 18 second solve, it seems I typically spend about 12 seconds turning and 6 seconds on pauses. That's already over 30%.


I have just spent some time experimenting, and although I am MUCH slower than you, I also estimate around 30% pausing. 

Note: I only count pausing between algs. I think that pausing during algs is too hard to measure, and also I believe, pretty minimal even at my relatively poor quality level. For me, pausing during algs, if any, is simply part of your TPS. 



AlphaSheep said:


> When I was averaging around a minute, if I spammed random moves (say R U R' U' over and over) as fast as I could, I could easily reach 5 moves per second.


What is spamming moves? Remember the key stat is not your max speed possible, it's your average over the whole solve -- surely as a beginner you were not averaging 5 moves per second for a one minute solve? That would mean you were making 300 moves in your solve!!!



AlphaSheep said:


> I don't know what percentage of my solves were pauses as a beginner, but 70% doesn't sound unreasonable.


I am beginner and, other than perhaps literally my first few solves, have never taken that much pausing. I chose a '100-second beginner' as my start point because this person has already passed the absolutely basic stage of working out how to solve the cube and so on, where inspection times may indeed be very long.



mark49152 said:


> As @AlphaSheep said, you'd be surprised. What feels like a tiny pause when you're solving looks much longer if you watch it back in a video.
> 
> A couple of years ago we did some experiments in the older cubers' thread. We timed a solve, then practised the same scramble a few times and timed again. The solution remains the same, TPS doesn't get faster, but since we know what cases are coming next, there are way fewer pauses. I don't remember the exact results but roughly we were seeing 20 second initial solves come down to 13-14 seconds, meaning that even at 20 seconds about 30% of time is spent paused. That's also consistent with what I see when I watch videos of my solves.


 Sure, 30% is consistent with what Alpha has also mentioned, and what I've estimated my own pausing at. That's why I find the 70% figure so hard to believe. 



mark49152 said:


> Down to about 30s it's really about basic competence in solving, like not screwing up and not spending several seconds recognising each case.


 If "not screwing up" means minimising accidental move blowouts, and "recognising each case" means pausing, you are clearly forgetting something ... TPS  Please correct my maths if I am wrong. 



mark49152 said:


> If anything, I think for a 100 second solver it's probably higher than 70% pauses.


 Remember, this means a beginner is doing 100 moves in lless than 30 seconds with an average TPS of over 3.3! I find that very unlikely.


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## PenguinsDontFly (Sep 7, 2016)

Ranzha said:


> Just be fluid
> You don't need crosses
> You don't need tps
> You don't need rotationless F2L or all your PLLs to be sub-1
> Just solve yo and you could average 12 like meeeeeeeeeeeee


Fluidity is gj
Never build crosses.
Never turn fast. 
Never rotate. 
Never use PLL.
Just learn roux and you don't need to turn fast because the efficiency does all the work for you. "Kian is slow, but Kian is efficient, so Kian is fast." If I had feliks tps i would almost be sub 6.


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## mark49152 (Sep 7, 2016)

I'm not sure where you are going with this...? 

There are three variables, not two. Move count, TPS, and pauses. It doesn't make sense to conflate pauses and TPS to give a TPS measure for the whole solve, because that measure doesn't help us understand how to improve.

All three variables are important and you need to improve all three to get fast. It sounds like you're saying TPS is more important than the others, but again it's not helpful to take it in isolation like that.

Typically we improve through phases. When very slow, we make big early gains by reducing pauses. Then we learn better F2L/B and more alg sets and become more move efficient. TPS improves gradually all the time. Once you know a good amount of algs and get to around 20s, improvement becomes harder because TPS takes longer to improve and reducing pauses means looking ahead rather than just shortening recognition further. The variables start to conflict with each other because pushing TPS too hard makes look ahead more difficult.

So it's complicated and saying TPS is the most important thing over-simplifies the process.

Also, 70% is just a guess, but 2-3 TPS is really not an unreasonable assumption for a beginner when doing sunes or F2L inserts, etc. The fact is, at 100 seconds the cuber is doing more searching than turning, and that's where those big early improvements are made. At that speed, I'm not sure it really makes much sense to analyse performance anyway. Improvement above 40-50s really is more about becoming competent than becoming fast.


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## biscuit (Sep 7, 2016)

There's no point comparing 100 second solvers to world <10 second solvers. At that level yes, TPS is more important. But only because TPS includes pauses. When you're that new, increasing TPS doesn't mean speeding up how fast you turn, but how frequently you turn.

And another really important factor is, as Mark said, that faster turning makes for harder lookahead, which is EVERYTHING. Look ahead is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most important thing in any current speedsolving method.


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## Escher (Sep 7, 2016)

mark49152 said:


> All three variables are important and you need to improve all three to get fast. It sounds like you're saying TPS is more important than the others, but again it's not helpful to take it in isolation like that.
> 
> Typically we improve through phases. When very slow, we make big early gains by reducing pauses. Then we learn better F2L/B and more alg sets and become more move efficient. TPS improves gradually all the time. Once you know a good amount of algs and get to around 20s, improvement becomes harder because TPS takes longer to improve and reducing pauses means looking ahead rather than just shortening recognition further. The variables start to conflict with each other because pushing TPS too hard makes look ahead more difficult.
> 
> So it's complicated and saying TPS is the most important thing over-simplifies the process.



Agreed.

I have a pretty good in-solve turning speed (not as fast as others at those RUR'U' exercises for example but I've never practised them), and I did a bunch of timed f2l solves the other day, I'm ~5.00 flat average at the moment. I did a few reconstructions and I'm tending towards high 20/low 30 for the majority of f2ls, which would mean I have a tps during f2l of around 6. Doesn't really tell you that much though, does it?

There is a categorical, and very important difference between turning speed and 'tps', a shorthand we use for moves/time. There are plenty of solvers about 2 seconds slower than I am that are capable of faster burst, and some that pause less than me. Min-maxing the trade-off as accurately as possible is the idea; you're trying to find that crystalline point in your noggin where you can't have both max speed and max lookahead, and force it to let you. It's honestly very hard and some people are simply not as good at it, regardless of practice or learning - they may just be better suited to beat some other task combination problem elsewhere. Compensations for this CAN be made in terms of hitting times, but they're very individual things, not something I'd blindly advise. I made a pretty picture:
Really quickly thrown together but you get the general idea.

Now in terms of actually getting better, priority thinking like the title isn't that useful either. It's not that helpful to say 'x is more important than y' when x and y are over-arching qualities of solving. Making a priority order for your practice is of course good though, once you've made some wider observations: 'I must have paused about 10 times that last solve, maybe more. Although I got a good time, it wasn't a qualitatively good solve, I need to turn a tad slower and concentrate more'.

In terms of your factor comparison (10s vs 100s, 50 moves vs 100), I'm afraid I don't feel like it's valid. Usain Bolt is 10x faster than a toddler, but that doesn't encapsulate anything useful. Clearly 'running faster' is important, but it's not a predicate so much as a judgement.

Edit: Btw, only just noticed you said you were a beginner - it's really cool that you're thinking about stuff like this as a novice. Can't promise I'll respond that quickly but you're welcome to PM me if you ever want some advice on improving.


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## tseitsei (Sep 7, 2016)

Why not both?


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## SenorJuan (Sep 7, 2016)

There's the fourth variable - cube rotations, which are actually time-consuming when you're at an advanced level. But when you're a beginner, they seem to be abundant and almost essential to completing the solve. Rotating just to inspect; doing it because you don't know how to do a move-sequence without rotn; rotating because you're faster with the RU moves than you are with the LU, many more reasons.
And then there's the fifth variable: the inspection process. Eg. CFOP: Beginners work out 2 or 3 edges, advanced solvers get 4 edges and have the first slot sorted out in advance.

It's pretty obvious TPS is mainly why we are seeing todays fast solves. The solve movecount is very similar to what it was 20 years ago, before finger-tricks and decent cubes, but the solve times are down to one third of what they were then.


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## Ranzha (Sep 7, 2016)

PenguinsDontFly said:


> Fluidity is gj
> Never build crosses.
> Never turn fast.
> Never rotate.
> ...


But I rotate and use PLL
Guess I'll never be fast
(Also I don't use Roux; I can't possibly be fast)


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## willi pilz (Sep 7, 2016)

Daniel Lin said:


> you're right-TPS is more important than efficiency for beginners. However once you get to a certain level, the amount of effort you put into efficiency pays off more. World class cubers (like Feliks) are so fast that it's hard for them to improve their TPS/lookahead, so they need to be efficient as well(xcrosses/ F2L tricks)


I just want to let you know, that this answer was literally perfect. It was a pleasure to read.


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## PenguinsDontFly (Sep 7, 2016)

Ranzha said:


> But I rotate and use PLL
> Guess I'll never be fast
> (Also I don't use Roux; I can't possibly be fast)


lol my propaganda 

Part of the reason I think roux and petrus are better than CFOP is pure efficiency. Eventually, when cubers are reaching human TPS limits and have perfect lookahead, roux and petrus will win.


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## Ranzha (Sep 8, 2016)

PenguinsDontFly said:


> lol my propaganda
> 
> Part of the reason I think roux and petrus are better than CFOP is pure efficiency. Eventually, when cubers are reaching human TPS limits and have perfect lookahead, roux and petrus will win.


Petrus probably won't win because of the lack of popularity. I see ZZ making huge strides though in recent years.


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## cubo (Sep 8, 2016)

mark49152 said:


> I'm not sure where you are going with this...?


 Wherever it takes us 


mark49152 said:


> There are three variables, not two. Move count, TPS, and pauses.


 Completely agree, and thank you again for bringing pauses into the discussion.


mark49152 said:


> It doesn't make sense to conflate pauses and TPS to give a TPS measure for the whole solve, because that measure doesn't help us understand how to improve.


 Again, agree. Given that the far majority of pausing happens between algs, not during algs, I think we can and should make a clean distinction between move count (total moves taken), pausing (total time taken between algs) and TPS (total time minus pause time divided by total moves taken).


mark49152 said:


> All three variables are important and you need to improve all three to get fast. It sounds like you're saying TPS is more important than the others, but again it's not helpful to take it in isolation like that.


 Yes ... and no. I'm saying that mathematically, the most important factor and biggest contributor to speed improvement between my two example cases (100 second solve and 10 second solve) is the difference in TPS. And honestly, that's just maths, as far as I can tell. (Please show me I'm wrong I will be happy to concede the point if shown otherwise.)

Just to clarify a couple of things, here's what I'm NOT saying:

I'm not saying TPS is the ONLY thing you must improve to get better times. Lowering move count and pauses will naturally also help. 

I'm not saying TPS improvement happens in isolation. Everything happens together. Learning new algs could lower move count and also help improve TPS if they are a smoother (faster) alg to perform, for you.



mark49152 said:


> Typically we improve through phases. When very slow, we make big early gains by reducing pauses.


 Agree, although perhaps still disagree on the amount of pausing at that early stage.



mark49152 said:


> Then we learn better F2L/B and more alg sets and become more move efficient. TPS improves gradually all the time. Once you know a good amount of algs and get to around 20s, improvement becomes harder because TPS takes longer to improve and reducing pauses means looking ahead rather than just shortening recognition further. The variables start to conflict with each other because pushing TPS too hard makes look ahead more difficult.
> 
> So it's complicated and saying TPS is the most important thing over-simplifies the process.


 Great description of the learning process and how it changes. Just to make the point again, I'm NOT saying "OK you're a 20 second solver and you want to get to 10 secs? Move those hands faster!" I am just observing that, overall, between 100 seconds and 10 seconds, hand speed makes the biggest impact.



mark49152 said:


> Also, 70% is just a guess


 I would love to get some more reliable data on this.



mark49152 said:


> Improvement above 40-50s really is more about becoming competent than becoming fast.


 What do you mean by "competent"?



biscuit said:


> There's no point comparing 100 second solvers to world <10 second solvers.


 Well actually, that's my whole point  And why not? 100 seconds is a nice round number, and is a point a cuber would reach fairly quickly after stumbling through the first, absolutely basic part of learning. Likewise 10 seconds is another nice round number representing a very advanced cuber, but not ridiculously advanced. Basically I just cut off the extremes of complete novice and world-class and got my 100 vs 10 second comparison. 



biscuit said:


> And another really important factor is, as Mark said, that faster turning makes for harder lookahead, which is EVERYTHING. Look ahead is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most important thing in any current speedsolving method.


 Why? Lookahead reduces pausing, but gains from reducing pausing, as I've previously demonstrated, is still not as important as gains from reducing TPS between the 100 sec and 10 sec solve.



Escher said:


> There is a categorical, and very important difference between turning speed and 'tps', a shorthand we use for moves/time. There are plenty of solvers about 2 seconds slower than I am that are capable of faster burst, and some that pause less than me. Min-maxing the trade-off as accurately as possible is the idea ...


 Just to clarify, are these "bursts" happening between different algs, or during a single alg? I assume the former, in which case you are basically describing the pauses ... and the balancing act between wanting to go faster (TPS) but also wanting to minimise pausing. But if upping your TPS gets you to the next alg faster, surely that gained time can be used to inspect once you get there - if needed, and perhaps it won't be - and you may still be ahead in the end?



Escher said:


> Now in terms of actually getting better, priority thinking like the title isn't that useful either.


 I was more making an observation rather than prescribing a training approach, which as a beginner, I don't feel qualified to do 



Escher said:


> Edit: Btw, only just noticed you said you were a beginner - it's really cool that you're thinking about stuff like this as a novice. Can't promise I'll respond that quickly but you're welcome to PM me if you ever want some advice on improving.


 Thank you so much! It's great to find an amazing cubing community such as this one!!



SenorJuan said:


> It's pretty obvious TPS is mainly why we are seeing todays fast solves. *The solve movecount is very similar to what it was 20 years ago*, before finger-tricks and decent cubes, *but the solve times are down to one third of what they were then*.


 Gracias senor, you have summed up my point beautifully. That, in essence, is all I am saying.


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## GuRoux (Sep 8, 2016)

PenguinsDontFly said:


> lol my propaganda
> 
> Part of the reason I think roux and petrus are better than CFOP is pure efficiency. Eventually, when cubers are reaching human TPS limits and have perfect lookahead, roux and petrus will win.



and there's huge popularity where pros have cubing as their full time job for several years before they even come close to breaking the world records. 

some of the previous post talk about what percent of the solve are pauses. i think in general, people are about 50% pauses. it's not until sub 10 that you see 10-30% pauses.


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## cubo (Sep 8, 2016)

Some new estimates, based on:

100 second solve, 100 moves, 50% pausing. TPS is therefore 2.00

10 second solve, 50 moves, 10% pausing. TPS is therefore 5.55
That means the improvement factors are now:

TPS (x2.78)
Move efficiency (x2)
Pausing (x1.78)
So _even with pausing at 50% initially_, TPS is *still* clearly the biggest factor, about 40% more significant than move reduction.

As a further note, if we consider how you could possibly improve 10 to 5 seconds in this scenario, the gains *would have to be almost all about improving TPS (about 70%) *with the rest a mixture of move reduction/lucky solves? (25%) and pause reduction (5%).

_This indicates to me that TPS is always the most important factor, and only becomes more so as you get lower times. _


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## mark49152 (Sep 8, 2016)

cubo said:


> So _even with pausing at 50% initially_, TPS is *still* clearly the biggest factor


How? You got 90 seconds faster, and 48 seconds of that was by eliminating pauses.


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## AlphaSheep (Sep 8, 2016)

cubo said:


> But if upping your TPS gets you to the next alg faster, surely that gained time can be used to inspect once you get there - if needed, and perhaps it won't be - and you may still be ahead in the end?



This is not true because you can't just go from paused to turning at full speed. There's a bit of a startup time, so while you may pause for half a second, it could actually cost you a full second on your total time. It would be better to turn at 75% speed to avoid the pause.

I think you're seeing a lot of disagreement in this thread because what you're saying goes against the experience of most fast cubers.

From what I've seen, the typical experience is this:

Learn to solve the cube, get to 60 seconds or so with a beginner method and a little practice. 
Learn F2L and maybe 4 look last layer.
Start trying to solve faster. Times drop quickly with practice and improving fingertricks and TPS alone. This gets most people to 25-35 seconds, but then they plateau and stop getting faster.
Learn better methods - 3 look or even 2 look last layer. This can get people to 20 seconds. Many people get stuck here trying to break the 20 second barrier.
Learn to transition between steps, and recognise cases without having to pause. To do this, you actually have to slow down your turn speed. This is where I am at the moment, and it seems to get people to around 12-15 seconds.
Learn to predict further and further in inspection and see two or more F2L cases ahead so you absolutely minimise pause in the solve. This seems to be the key difference I've noticed between 11-12 second solvers and 8-9 second solvers.
I've met so many people with TPS far higher than mine stuck at step 3 because the think that TPS is everything.

I don't disagree that TPS is important - its a large part of what separates a 100s solver from a 30s solver, but the key difference between a 20s solver and a 10s solver is lookahead, minimal pauses, and efficiency, and TPS only plays a small role.

It's also worth noting that the reason for this is that TPS is far easier to improve on than anything else, especially for a beginner. It's the only thing that gets better with mindless practice. Lookahead and efficiency need you to actively concentrate to improve, but just mindlessly scrambling a cube helps with TPS. On top of that, having a higher TPS actually makes it harder to improve at the other things. The faster you turn, the harder it becomes to track pieces and see the next case. Honestly, I've cut my times by 20% just by turning slower.



cubo said:


> And honestly, that's just maths, as far as I can tell. (Please show me I'm wrong I will be happy to concede the point if shown otherwise.)



I'll try take you up on that offer.

Let me try make an analogy. A bicycle can cover 10 km in 20 min (30 km/h), and a car can cover 5 km in 2.5 min (120 km/h). The halving the distance for the car contributes a 2x factor, whereas the speed contributes a 4x factor. At first glance this seems fine - you would conclude by your argument that the car being faster is more important than the distance in determining travel time.

If you think about it, that's obviously not a valid conclusion. I could increase the distance for the car, to say 200 km, but leave the distance for the bicycle the same. Now the bicycle will reach it's destination long before the car, so it appears that the distance is more important in this case. The correct answer is that travel time is a function of both distance and speed and neither is more important than the other.

To bring it back to cubing and your argument, you've noted that fast solvers typically have a faster TPS (bundling pauses in with the rest of solve time for simplicity) with a 5x factor but the move count only differs by a factor of 2x. You wrongly conclude that TPS is therefore more important, when as with the analogy above, neither is more important than the other.

The actual reason that the factor for TPS is higher is just because TPS is a lot easier to improve with very little effort. In fact, since TPS gets better without much effort, it could be said that its more important to concentrate on move efficiency.

Obviously there's a tradeoff. Which is why, as has already been mentioned a few times in this thread, most people use algs that are a couple moves longer than optimal, because they flow more smoothly and can be executed faster. This is something that pretty much every fast cuber is well aware of.


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## shadowslice e (Sep 8, 2016)

You know, I think most of the arguments you're getting here is that people are disagreeing with your use of the phrase "more important"; improves most=/=more important.


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## cubo (Sep 8, 2016)

mark49152 said:


> How? You got 90 seconds faster, and 48 seconds of that was by eliminating pauses.


 Although I can see how you got that number, I don't think it's mathematically correct because it tries to calculate an absolute figure but we are dealing in 3 intertwined factors. By that logic, move improvement has saved us 25 seconds (by halving the 50 secs of active solve time) and TPS has saved us 32 seconds (by going from 2 moves per second to 5.5 moves per second) for a total of 105 seconds saved!!

My calculation is based on the relative contribution of each factor to the overall x10 time improvement (which is just another way of saying our 10 second time is 10 times faster than out 100 second time). Our 3 factors, when multiplied together, must equal 10. That's my calculation above (it's actually a bit under 10 because pausing should be 1.8 not 1.78, I'll show why below - my first calc was made in haste). 

Another way of considering the mathematical importance of each factor is to look at our 10 second solve and then imagine what would happen if each factor regressed to the beginner level and see which one causes us to lose the most time, as that will be the most important factor in this inverse scenario. So ... 

If our 10 second solver lost all
their move efficiency and went back to 100 moves (while maintaining the better TPS and pause time) their total solve time would now be 20 seconds seconds (18 second solve plus 2 seconds pause time). 

If our 10 second solver went back to 50% pause time, that would be a new total of 18 seconds (9 second solve with 9 seconds of pausing). This is slightly lower than the new time if we lost our move efficiency, meaning pausing is slightly less of a factor than move efficiency.

And lastly, if we went back to our old TPS of 2 moves per second (while keeping our improved move efficiency and pause time), our time blows out all the way to 27.8 seconds seconds (25 second solve plus 2.8 seconds pause).

Now you should be able to see the factors more clearly ...

Move efficiency blows us out from 10 secs to 20 secs, so it's a x2 factor. 

Pause improvement blows us out from 10 secs to 18 secs, so it's a X1.8 factor.

And lastly, TPS, which if lost blows our 10 secs time all the way out to 27.8 secs, is a x2.78 factor. 

Mark does that explanation make what I'm saying any clearer?

PS Alpha and Shadow I will respond in the morning, gotta hit the sack now. 

Peace out all


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## mark49152 (Sep 8, 2016)

cubo said:


> Mark does that explanation make what I'm saying any clearer?


Yes your reasoning is clear, but I don't agree with it. You've now created three hypothetical solvers who have regressed on each of the three variables alone. Except that your pausing solver hasn't fully regressed because he still pauses 41 seconds less than the 100 second solver.

I think you should go back and read the analogies about speed and distance above.

I'm curious about your experience. How long have you been cubing and how has your own progression been so far?


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## Escher (Sep 8, 2016)

cubo said:


> Just to clarify, are these "bursts" happening between different algs, or during a single alg? I assume the former, in which case you are basically describing the pauses ... and the balancing act between wanting to go faster (TPS) but also wanting to minimise pausing. But if upping your TPS gets you to the next alg faster, surely that gained time can be used to inspect once you get there - if needed, and perhaps it won't be - and you may still be ahead in the end?



Well, no, I actually mean max turnspeed, as in, someone who can execute a fixed sequence of moves faster than I can. Choosing to up your tps and inspect later makes me feel dirty, not from phobia but from experience. You are not just blindly anticipating and executing fixed patterns at the highest level (tbh neither are a lot of intermediates). You are making predictions, inferences and assumptions, and it's much easier to solve those individual questions across 2-3 seconds of turning - slow enough to strengthen or solidify existing theories and begin generating new ones, rather than blast out one seconds worth of high tps without updating any of your existing lookahead. You need to act just slow enough to collect information as it is being revealed to you.

Also I'm hot on paint these days and I made you another couple of pics.




Hope this helps,

Rowan


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## JanW (Sep 8, 2016)

I agree with Mark that you improve the most by eliminating pauses and improving look ahead, not by improving TPS. 

Your TPS theory makes the false assumption that the TPS of a beginner is dependent on how fast this solver is able to perform algs. Also, you seem to assume that TPS is uniform over the entire solve. It's not. A beginner using the method that ends with spamming sexy moves uses 27 or 52 moves only to orient the LL corners. If it's 52 moves, it will not take half the time of a 100 move 1-minute solve. Far from it. The 1-minute solver would most likely do this step at way above 5 tps.

Most of the solve time will be spent on F2L. TPS during F2L is not limited by how fast you can turn the faces of the cube. Your TPS is mainly determined by how fast you can find your pieces and work out how to insert them. As many have mentioned, aiming at high TPS at this stage is actually detrimental to your solving time, as it results in worse look ahead. If you use layer by layer, inserting the corners, then the edges should be 40 moves max. Add a badly planned 10 move cross to that and it's 50 moves for cross+F2L. At a very modest 2 moves/second, it should be done in 25 seconds, which is much faster than a 1-minute solver would manage. And the reason they can't do it in 25 seconds is not that they can't perform the algs at 2 moves/second. As long as you have a half-decent cube, anyone can do a R U R' insertion in <1 second without any training at all.

Like Alpha Sheep said, improved TPS comes automatically the more you solve. Focus on look ahead and learning more efficient algs will bring you much faster from 1 minute to 20 seconds.


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## cubo (Sep 9, 2016)

shadowslice e said:


> You know, I think most of the arguments you're getting here is that people are disagreeing with your use of the phrase "more important"; improves most=/=more important.


 Yes I know what you mean ... but the alternatives "most significant", "biggest impact" etc don't seem better.

Again: my observation is NOT about saying "this means you must focus on TPS above all else". That would be prescriptive, which as a beginner I don't feel qualified to be. It may actually be that you don't need to focus on TPS at all as you progress. I simply don't feel qualified to comment on that. *Telling people how to get better is NOT my point here*.

Rather, _I'm simply observing and describing the mathematics involved in moving between two realistic scenarios and pointing out that, overall, TPS contributes most (i.e. is most significant, important, whatevs ) in the overall time improvement between those two scenarios_.

Hi Alpha! My comments in bold in this quote ...



AlphaSheep said:


> From what I've seen, the typical experience is this:
> 
> Learn to solve the cube, get to 60 seconds or so with a beginner method and a little practice.* So TPS + lower pausing get you here?*
> 
> ...


 Well I don't really disagree with any of that ... or more precisely, I'll take your word for it because I actually don't know. All I've been saying is that if we look at 100 to 10 secs, TPS is a large part of that overall (definitely the largest part  ) but that efficiency and pausing are also significant.



AlphaSheep said:


> It's also worth noting that the reason for this is that TPS is far easier to improve on than anything else, especially for a beginner. It's the only thing that gets better with mindless practice. Lookahead and efficiency need you to actively concentrate to improve, but just mindlessly scrambling a cube helps with TPS.


 If anything I think that supports my point. Maybe TPS is the biggest factor in improvement precisely _because_ it is largely mindless -- although I would challenge whether finger tricks, which can really help TPS, are mindless? They seem to take strong effort at first.



AlphaSheep said:


> On top of that, having a higher TPS actually makes it harder to improve at the other things. The faster you turn, the harder it becomes to track pieces and see the next case. Honestly, I've cut my times by 20% just by turning slower.


 That may indeed be the case_ at some point _in your 100 sec to 10 sec journey. But my observation is regarding the overall improvement over the entire period.



AlphaSheep said:


> I'll try take you up on that offer ... Let me try make an analogy. A bicycle can cover 10 km in 20 min (30 km/h), and a car can cover 5 km in 2.5 min (120 km/h). The halving the distance for the car contributes a 2x factor, whereas the speed contributes a 4x factor. At first glance this seems fine - you would conclude by your argument that the car being faster is more important than the distance in determining travel time. If you think about it, that's obviously not a valid conclusion. I could increase the distance for the car, to say 200 km, but leave the distance for the bicycle the same. Now the bicycle will reach it's destination long before the car, so *it appears that the distance is more important in this case*.


 Um yes, because it actually is. If you are trying to answer the question "Why does the car take longer than the bike to reach its destination in this case?" then the answer is VERY much, "Because the car had to travel 200 km and the bike only traveled 10km." Am I missing something?

But actually I love this analogy! It can be used to illustrate exactly what I'm saying. Presenting ...

*RUBIK'S ROAD RACE
Rules: a 100km race, use any vehicle you want, if you can find a shortcut you are welcome to take it, no maps allowed.*

*Novice racer: *uses a car with a top speed of 120 km/h, takes no shortcuts and hence travels the full 100km (in 50 mins), but spends half the time stopped by the road working out where to go (also 50 mins). *Final time: 100 minutes. 

Expert racer: *uses a car that is 2.8 times faster (336 km/h), takes a shortcut which means he only actually travels 50km, and spends only 10% of the time stopped by the road working out where to go. *Final time: 10 minutes. 
*
Sound familiar? I hope so. 'Speed' here is TPS, 'distance' is move efficiency, and 'stopped by the road' is pause time. And it perfectly matches my example, using the same contributing factors. *And as per my example, the most important is ... speed, aka TPS. *



AlphaSheep said:


> Obviously there's a tradeoff. Which is why, as has already been mentioned a few times in this thread, most people use algs that are a couple moves longer than optimal, because they flow more smoothly and can be executed faster. This is something that pretty much every fast cuber is well aware of.


 100% agree in fact I mentioned it myself previously in this thread


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## GenTheThief (Sep 9, 2016)

cubo said:


> Hi Alpha! My comments in bold in this quote ...
> 
> 
> 
> ...



So, one thing I don't think you get is that when TPS increases, your lookahead goes down and your pauses go up.

A quote from AlphaSheep from June talking about data tracking:


AlphaSheep said:


> A few months ago I decided to focus purely on TPS. I got some awesome singles, and some really good Ao5s and it certainly *felt* like I was getting faster. But then when I checked my progress graph, *my big averages were steadily getting worse*. It made me look at my solves more critically, and I realised my lookahead had been suffering. Once I started working on that, the big averages started falling again.



I don't think you can really compare 100sec -> 10sec.

As alphasheep said, 


AlphaSheep said:


> From what I've seen, the typical experience is this:
> 
> Learn to solve the cube, get to 60 seconds or so with a beginner method and a little practice. *TPS*
> Learn F2L and maybe 4 look last layer. *Efficiency, a little TPS*
> ...



I average high 16 right now, but a couple months ago, when I was still sup-17, I decided to do a slow solve. It was completely random, I just felt like doing a slow solve. I did it _and I got a 15 with barely ~3 TPS_.
The thing that dropped 2 seconds, was a _decrease_ in TPS and pauses, and an increase in efficiency.


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## cubo (Sep 9, 2016)

mark49152 said:


> Yes your reasoning is clear, but I don't agree with it.


 That feels like you're saying "It's clear that 1+1=2. But I don't agree with it." ??? When it comes to the maths, which bit don't you agree with? Please please point out my error if you see one. I've pointed out yours in detail above.



mark49152 said:


> You've now created three hypothetical solvers who have regressed on each of the three variables alone. Except that your pausing solver hasn't fully regressed because he still pauses 41 seconds less than the 100 second solver.


 Exactly, I created 3 hypotheticals to illustrate the way the 3 factors interletate to each other to create, in combination, a x10 time savings, because it was clear from your 48 second-pausing-gain claim (now changed to 41 seconds) that you weren't grasping it. But now we're going backwards ... you've just repeated your last claim. Let me put it this way: the 41 seconds you talk about is as much about TPS and efficiency as pausing, because the improved pausing rate of 10%_ is relative to the total time, which has also been lowered (in fact, more so) by TPS and efficiency_. Pausing has absolutely NOT NOT NOT saved all that time itself. And when you look at the 3 factors in their interaction, as I have done multiple times now, it is clear which one is most significant: TPS!

If you really think pausing saved 41 seconds, let me ask you this: how much do you think TPS and efficiency saved on the way from 100 secs to 10 secs? Please show me, using the parameters set out (100 secs, 100 moves, 50% pausing ... to 10 secs, 50 moves, 10% pausing). I think you'll find your way just doesn't add up.



mark49152 said:


> I think you should go back and read the analogies about speed and distance above.


 My post above this one addresses those and the simple mistake alpha has made.



mark49152 said:


> I'm curious about your experience. How long have you been cubing and how has your own progression been so far?


 6 months, not regularly because I've got kids and a job, current pb 45 secs, av 60 secs. I consider myself a noob. My progress to date has been a mixture of improving TPS (practice, practice, finger tricks and choosing my algs wisely), efficiency (currently transitioning from keyhole to F2L) and reducing pausing - so all 3  I'm a long way from 10 seconds.


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## genericcuber666 (Sep 9, 2016)

Nobody really pauses who bring that up even when we were able averaging 40-70 we only paused for max 10 seconds after that we all learnt to look ahead making pauses irrelevant except at all if that's what you mean but I don't see sub 10 people pausing


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## sotolf2 (Sep 9, 2016)

cubo said:


> That feels like you're saying "It's clear that 1+1=2. But I don't agree with it." ??? When it comes to the maths, which bit don't you agree with? Please please point out my error if you see one. I've pointed out yours in detail above.



I think what he, me and others don't agree with is that TPS will get you anywhere without good lookahead, if you don't have good lookahead you have to do random moves to keep your TPS up, which will make your lookahead even worse. I find it to be nonsense to say that TPS is more important than lookahead because it's not something you can meanfully obtain without good lookahead.

I have seen people do slow solves that are a lot faster than my TPS spamming tries, but I haven't seen someone with bad lookahead spamming moves at random managing to beat me.

And how can you train lookahead by spamming TPS? it can't be done, it has to be done slower, so go slower to train, and first go faster when you actually know where the pieces are, it's not like you start driving training on the highway in 120 km/h you start slower until you know what you're doing, and first then when you know what to look for and are more secure in what you're doing you're finally doing speed, and by that time the speed is better since you've slowly built it up together with your lookahead ability. To be honest I don't get what's hard to understand about that


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## mark49152 (Sep 9, 2016)

cubo said:


> Exactly, I created 3 hypotheticals to illustrate the way the 3 factors interletate to each other to create, in combination, a x10 time savings, because it was clear from your 48 second-pausing-gain claim (now changed to 41 seconds) that you weren't grasping it. But now we're going backwards ... you've just repeated your last claim. Let me put it this way: the 41 seconds you talk about is as much about TPS and efficiency as pausing, because the improved pausing rate of 10%_ is relative to the total time, which has also been lowered (in fact, more so) by TPS and efficiency_. Pausing has absolutely NOT NOT NOT saved all that time itself. And when you look at the 3 factors in their interaction, as I have done multiple times now, it is clear which one is most significant: TPS!


Your 100 second example solver paused for 50 seconds. Your 10 second solver paused for 1 second. You then created another hypothetical solver that had the TPS and efficiency of a 10 second solver and claimed he made "no improvement" in pauses relative to the 100 second solver because he paused for 9 seconds which is 50% of his solve. This is what I disagree with. The measure of pauses is seconds, not a percentage. Your assumption that the time you spend searching or thinking is somehow a function of your TPS and move efficiency is bogus. If he had made genuinely no improvement in pauses, he would have turned for 9 seconds, paused for 50 seconds, total 59, and your case falls apart.

The reason I asked earlier where you were going with this is because I don't understand the purpose or value of your argument. You seem determined to prove and hammer home this TPS-is-most-important point, which seems a useless conclusion derived from over-simplification and dubious assumptions. It's an interesting discussion, which I enjoyed at first, and there has been some good info and advice posted by others, but why is this TPS point so important? As has been said many times, it's really not as simple as that.


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## AlphaSheep (Sep 9, 2016)

cubo said:


> Um yes, because it actually is. If you are trying to answer the question "Why does the car take longer than the bike to reach its destination in this case?" then the answer is VERY much, "Because the car had to travel 200 km and the bike only traveled 10km." Am I missing something?
> 
> But actually I love this analogy! It can be used to illustrate exactly what I'm saying. Presenting ...
> 
> ...


I think you've missed the point. All you've shown is that speed contributes the most in this specific case, not that it's the most important, but if you change the circumstances you get a different results.

I know you're considering a 100 second solver but what happens if you consider an 80 or 60 second solver?

Also I'm still not convinced the numbers for percentage time paused and total move count. Would you (or any other person in 90 seconds or slower) be willing to record a video of 5 solves? I'd like to try count the moves and pauses.


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## JanW (Sep 9, 2016)

AlphaSheep said:


> Also I'm still not convinced the numbers for percentage time paused and total move count. Would you (or any other person in 90 seconds or slower) be willing to record a video of 5 solves? I'd like to try count the moves and pauses.


When Marcel started the thread currently known as Older cuber discussions back in 2012, he posted a 90 seconds solve which seems to be about 100 moves. The video is still up with a link in the OP of that thread. I just watched it and tried to count the moves by clicking the calculator to increase by +1 whenever he turned. It was actually hard to keep up at times, because his TPS while doing algs was pretty fast. The majority of the time is spent rotating the cube and looking for pieces.

If you do an analysis to count moves and pauses, then I think unnecessary moves, such as U-U-U2 while looking for the next F2L pair, should count as pausing as well.


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## tseitsei (Sep 9, 2016)

I did some quick solves like this for fun. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

*1st avg5: 47.66s*
I used a beginner method
1.cross
2. bottom corners
3. middle edges
4. fruruf
5. beginner corner twist
6. u-perm(s)
7. a-perm(s)
In addition to that I tried to turn quite slowly

The move count of this method turned out to be ~110 moves so my TPS was ~2.3.

*2nd avg5: 27.56s*
I used the same method described above but now I turned as fast as I could. So my TPS was ~4.

*3rd avg5: 22.76s*
I used full CFOP but slow turning. CFOP has a move count of about 60 moves so my TPS was ~2.6.


*My conclusion:*
I could get sub-50 with total beginner method and slow turning (really try it. Below 3 TPS is really quite slow and I believe anyone could do that with minimal practise. I mean if you can do a standard T-perm sub-4.6 that is already >3TPS). So to me that means that eliminating pauses is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing by far. Also note that my solves still have pauses too so by eliminating pauses completely you could get even better times.

I was also able to get 22s avg with only 2.6TPS so TPS really isn't that important until you are sub-20 or sub-15 at least...


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## mark49152 (Sep 9, 2016)

@tseitsei, I don't quite follow. Are you saying you deliberately added pauses between the steps in your beginners solve? Are pauses included in your TPS?

Anyway, the reason for the disagreement in this thread all comes down to how pauses are measured and expressed.

To my mind, solvetime = (movecount / TPS) + pauses. Where the unit of pauses is seconds. Fewer seconds paused is an improvement.

@cubo is using a model where solvetime = (movecount / TPS) * pausefactor. In his model, the 18 second solver who pauses for 9 seconds has the same pausefactor as the 100 second solver who pauses for 50 seconds and that represents no improvement.

So we can come up with plenty of examples where in the first model, and intuitively, reducing pauses is the main contributor to improvement in solve times, but when expressed as a pausefactor in the second model it isn't.

Obviously my position is that I don't agree with his model. For @cubo and anyone else who chooses to follow the pausefactor model, I can't fault his arithmetic and agree that this notional pausefactor has a smaller impact than TPS in the example he gave.


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## tseitsei (Sep 9, 2016)

mark49152 said:


> @tseitsei, I don't quite follow. Are you saying you deliberately added pauses between the steps in your beginners solve? Are pauses included in your TPS?
> 
> Anyway, the reason for the disagreement in this thread all comes down to how pauses are measured and expressed.
> 
> To my mind, solvetime = (movecount / TPS) + pauses. Where the unit of pauses is seconds. Fewer seconds paused is an improvement.



I didn't deliberately add any pauses. I tried to do as smooth solves as I could every time. I only altered my turning speed and method (only altered method between 2nd and 3rd avg).
And yes all the pauses that were still left (since my lookahead isn't perfect) are included in my TPS reading.

My point is that even while turning slowly and using a very simple and inefficient method I was able to achieve sub-50 times and while turning slowly and using a better method (CFOP) I could achieve 22s times. AND to add to that my solves still had some pauses (since my lookahead isn't perfect) so IF I was able to completely eliminate pauses I could achieve sub-20 times with quite slow turning speed.

So IMO eliminating pauses is much more important than TPS if you still average 20+ seconds.

And yes solvetime = (movecount / TPS) + pauses but most people don't really realize how big parts of their solves really are just pauses. If you eliminate all pauses you can achieve reasonable times even with quite lousy TPS.

I hope that you can understand what I'm trying to say now


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## Rubix Cubix (Sep 9, 2016)

I think this is an interesting video that helps to prove the point that a fast TPS can be more effective than move count. As he manages to get sub-20 using the beginner method.


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## mark49152 (Sep 9, 2016)

tseitsei said:


> I hope that you can understand what I'm trying to say now


Yes. You mentioned pauses so I thought maybe you added some. For what it's worth, I think beginners pause in ways that it's hard to even imagine once you're experienced. I remember trying to do F2L, spotting a corner then spending 5+ seconds searching for the matching edge. These days, I just seem to automatically know where the edge is.


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## tseitsei (Sep 9, 2016)

Rubix Cubix said:


> I think this is an interesting video that helps to prove the point that a fast TPS can be more effective than move count. As he manages to get sub-20 using the beginner method.


Yep. But having no pauses is even more important than either of those. You dont really see him pausing during those solves now do you?



mark49152 said:


> Yes. You mentioned pauses so I thought maybe you added some. For what it's worth, I think beginners pause in ways that it's hard to even imagine once you're experienced. I remember trying to do F2L, spotting a corner then spending 5+ seconds searching for the matching edge. These days, I just seem to automatically know where the edge is.


Yes! and that is exactly why eliminating pauses is SO important. You can use an insane amount of time just pausing...


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## cubo (Sep 10, 2016)

mark49152 said:


> The reason I asked earlier where you were going with this is because I don't understand the purpose or value of your argument. You seem determined to prove and hammer home this TPS-is-most-important point, which seems a useless conclusion derived from over-simplification and dubious assumptions. It's an interesting discussion, which I enjoyed at first, and there has been some good info and advice posted by others, but why is this TPS point so important? As has been said many times, it's really not as simple as that.


 Hey Mark,

My purpose was to start a discussion based on a thought experiment. So in terms of that, it's succeeded 

Its value as an experiment is, I believe, in calling attention to the role of TPS. 

I admit that calling TPS "most important" is what seems to have provoked the strongest reactions, but it is a valid claim providing people understand that it is specific to the parameters established by the thought experiment and has never been about me telling people how to get better in general. You can criticise the parameters chosen, but not the results drawn from them, mathematically speaking.

As I have already said, but I'll repeat, despite TPS improvement clearly being a crucial part of overall time improvement, it may be something a cuber should not ever specifically try to improve, and in fact (as many people are keen to remind me), at least at some points in a cubers improvement, it may be more effective to deliberately reduce your TPS. This is the "slow to go fast" mantra I keep hearing. I've never disagreed with this.

In terms of taking issues with my experiment, I think the main outstanding question is the amount of pausing involved at various developmental stages (this is something I will investigate further).

I have certainly enjoyed the stimulating discussion and has given me lots of further food for thought.

Thanks for being part of that.



AlphaSheep said:


> Would you (or any other person in 90 seconds or slower) be willing to record a video of 5 solves? I'd like to try count the moves and pauses.


 Hey Alpha, definitely keen to get more data on pausing. But perhaps the data is already available somewhere? A single sample from me wouldn't prove much.



JanW said:


> Your TPS theory makes the false assumption that the TPS of a beginner is dependent on how fast this solver is able to perform algs.


 Actually "how fast you perform algs" is the definition of TPS. Turns don't happen while pausing 



JanW said:


> TPS is mainly determined by how fast you can find your pieces and work out how to insert them.


 I believe what you've just described is look ahead, if done during algs, or pausing, if done between them. And although there is clearly a relationship between these and TPS, they are categorically different.


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## JanW (Sep 10, 2016)

cubo said:


> Actually "how fast you perform algs" is the definition of TPS. Turns don't happen while pausing
> 
> I believe what you've just described is look ahead, if done during algs, or pausing, if done between them. And although there is clearly a relationship between these and TPS, they are categorically different.


You missed my point there. The point is that TPS is irrelevant as long as you don't know what you are supposed to turn. A beginner can be capable of quite high TPS, but cannot use this speed. To get faster, you learn look ahead to eliminate pauses and through this increase your overall TPS.

I hope @MarcelP doesn't mind me using his 4 year old solve as an example, it's just because he is the only person I know of who has both 90 and 12 second solves on youtube to compare improvement. 

Have a look at this 90 second solve and you should see that TPS is not the bottleneck:





Cross: 14 moves, about 14 seconds, 1 TPS. With pauses between just about every single move, it's quite impossible to measure any value for TPS here.

F2L: about 44 moves, 50 seconds, <1 TPS. Again so much pauses it's hard to give any value to TPS. I mean, second F2L pair is formed in the upper layer when he starts looking for it, but what should be a 4 move insertion takes 7 seconds. How do you measure TPS for that?

LL: about 50 moves, 30 seconds, 1.67 TPS. Since this is the part where alg drilling and improving TPS has the greatest effect, I looked at this part at half speed to see that there was about 14 seconds of pausing and 16 seconds of turning the cube. That would make about 3.1 TPS. (This alone should tell you that eliminating pauses is the most important. Pauses can be just about completely eliminated, especially at 3 TPS, to reduce the time by 14 seconds. Doubling TPS to a very good 6.2 TPS only cuts 8 seconds.)

Next, here's same person 4 years later solving in 12 seconds:





He did a reconstruction of that solve in Older cuber discussions, it's 67 moves, 5.5 TPS. TPS is obviously much faster, but pausing has been reduced by a much greater factor. Hard to tell how much could be counted as pausing without counting frames.

4 years ago his TPS during last layer was about 3, and he used 50 moves. In the 12 second solve it's 26 moves. The time from finishing F2L to solved is about 4.7 seconds. Looks like about 0.7 seconds of this is recognition, so 0.7 seconds pausing and 4 seconds solving, 6.5 TPS.

Now we have some actual numbers to compare.

Total time spent on LL improved by a factor of 6.38 from 30 seconds to 4.7 seconds.
TPS, improved from 3.1 to 6.5, improvement factor 2.09
Movecount improved from 50 to 26, improvement factor 1.92
Pausing reduced from 14 seconds to 0.7 seconds, improvement factor 20

Improving from 90 seconds to 12 seconds, TPS improved a bit more than movecount. Though it's very close to a tie and far from TPS being "way more important" than movecount. And both TPS and Movecount mean nothing if you don't improve lookahead to remove those pauses.

Edit: fixed the post, had some numbers wrong at first.

Edit again... Marcel's reconstruction had the wrong movecount, which explains how I counted wrong twice.  The real movecount for last layer is 25, here are the true numbers:

Total time spent on LL improved by a factor of 6.38 from 30 seconds to 4.7 seconds.
TPS, improved from 3.125 to 6.25, improvement factor 2.0
Movecount improved from 50 to 25, improvement factor 2.0
Pausing reduced from 14 seconds to 0.7 seconds, improvement factor 20

It is in fact exactly a tie between TPS and movecount.


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## tseitsei (Sep 10, 2016)

That last post by JanW is awesome and pretty much finishes this thread perfectly right there...


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## mark49152 (Sep 10, 2016)

cubo said:


> What do you mean by "competent"?


I didn't answer this and would like to.

In my view, the early stages of improvement are just about learning to solve the puzzle well. A lot of that is about basic technique, basic efficiency, not making mistakes, recognition, and developing familiarity with the puzzle. In terms of our metrics, that translates mostly to pause reduction and move count. You could improve like this for say a month, and then look back and feel that you are not really "going faster", despite what the timer says, but that solving the puzzle is just easier.

At some point, you get to a level where you have a good solving rhythm, you know the cube and your cases and algs well, and solving the cube feels easy and fluid, but you're just not getting faster. You find that you really have to *push* to get faster, whether that means turning faster or concentrating on lookahead, or learning new algs, etc. Improvement is no longer about solving becoming easier, it's about pushing to go faster. Pushing means you have to deliberately work at it.

Obviously in practice it's not so black and white as that and there's no fixed point where competence is achieved and speed training starts. It's a gradual transition. I would say it's mostly competence down to about 30-40 seconds, and mostly pushing speed below 20-25 seconds.

I started cubing in 2012 and have kept detailed logs of my performance since then, including splits, with measurements like cross+1 and last pair+LL so that I have some measurements of pauses as well. This morning I found some time to go through those numbers and make some calculations about my own improvement. I don't have videos from that time, unfortunately.

I started timing myself at around 70 seconds and in the last couple of weeks of 2012 I dropped from 70 to 50 seconds very quickly, which I believe is just competence (as above) and not worth analysing. At the end of 2013 I was at 28.5 seconds average of 50, and end of 2014, 19.7 seconds.

At 50 seconds, I was already using 3LLL and had learned good solutions for cross and F2L cases, so my move count was about 70 on average. That's based on measurements and notes from the time, not guesswork. My maximum TPS was 2.4, measured from PLL drills, and pauses accounted for about 21.1 seconds of the total solve. How I calculated pauses is a long story that I don't have time for in this post, sorry. Maybe later.

At 28.5 seconds, average TPS was 4, pauses 12.2 seconds, and I knew about half of OLL so I estimate move count at 65.

At 19.7 seconds, full OLL so 60 moves, TPS 4.7, and pauses 7 seconds. That 7 seconds sounds high and I will go look at some videos to see if that's really true, but it wouldn't surprise me. Because of the way I calculated it, dips in TPS due to e.g. looking ahead during F2L would also be accounted for as pauses rather than lower TPS.


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## shadowslice e (Sep 10, 2016)

cubo said:


> Yes I know what you mean ... but the alternatives "most significant", "biggest impact" etc don't seem better.
> 
> Again: my observation is NOT about saying "this means you must focus on TPS above all else". That would be prescriptive, which as a beginner I don't feel qualified to be. It may actually be that you don't need to focus on TPS at all as you progress. I simply don't feel qualified to comment on that. *Telling people how to get better is NOT my point here*.
> 
> Rather, _I'm simply observing and describing the mathematics involved in moving between two realistic scenarios and pointing out that, overall, TPS contributes most (i.e. is most significant, important, whatevs ) in the overall time improvement between those two scenarios_.


If that's what you're doing, then I think a better title for this thread would be: "Tps improves the most in transition from beginner to world standard" or similar. I'm sure you could think of a better title in the same vein.


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## cubo (Sep 11, 2016)

Hey @JanW, yes I did miss your point I think, my apologies. 

We are talking about different ways to measure TPS. The two ways it can be done are:

TPS = total move count / total time. e.g. 100 move solve in 100 secs, 50% pausing, is TPS of 1. That's how I calculated TPS in the OP (although I didn't mention pausing because I hadn't considered it until Mark raised it). This approach essentially "absorbs" any pausing into the TPS measure. 

TPS = total move count / (total time minus pausing). e.g. 100 move solve in 100 secs, 50% pausing, is TPS of 2. That's how I've been calculating TPS since introducing pausing into the mix. This approach strictly separates pausing from TPS, as per my last comment about "turns don't happen during pausing". 
Both are valid approaches. Main thing is to be clear which we are using. 

I'm short on time now, will respond properly to your post about Marcel's times later.


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## cubo (Sep 11, 2016)

Hey again @JanW,

So looking at the figures you posted for Marcel:

*LL only*

50 moves in 30 seconds with 14 seconds pausing (47%), to 25 moves in 4.7 seconds with 0.7 seconds pausing (15%).

Move count improved x2 (50 to 25), TPS improved x2.08 (3.125 to 6.5), pausing improved x3.11 (47 to 15)
So what does this all tell us?

It tells us that, for the LL phase, _pause reduction was a significantly higher factor than TPS or move count in Marcel's improved times_.

As for the whole solve? Well that depends on our estimate of pausing for the whole solve, but if we used the same figures we used for the LL (47% and 15%) ...

*Entire solve*

108 moves in 94 seconds with 47% pausing, to 67 moves in 12 seconds with 15% pausing. 

Move count improved x1.61 (108 to 67), TPS improved x3.03 (2.17 to 6.57), pausing improved x3.11 (47 to 15)
This tells us that, over the whole solve, _pause reduction and TPS were similar in effect (pause reduction slightly higher) and that each of them was way more important than move reduction_.

Considering the winning result for pause reduction in the LL, but the closer result to TPS overall, this suggests _TPS was more important than pause reduction as an improvement factor in the F2L_. 

Very, very interesting!

Hey @mark49152,

Thanks for your thoughts on competence and for sharing your stats.

Going from 50 secs / 70 moves / 21 secs pausing ... to 19.7 secs / 60 moves / 7 secs pausing ... it's VERY clear that move count has not been a big factor in you getting more than twice as fast overall. Likewise, as a percentage your pausing has only moved from 40% to about 35%. 

So that leaves ...


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## JanW (Sep 11, 2016)

I realized after I wrote the post above that looking at som "improvement factor" was really bad and doesn't make any sense at all (reducing pauses from 14 to 0.7 seconds is not 10 times better than reducing from 14 to 7 seconds and reducing pauses to 0 is not an infinite improvement).

What you should look at instead is how the reductions affect the time. I doubt the 47% and 15% pausing figures are accurate for the whole solves, but let's assume they are.

94s solve consists of 44 seconds pausing and 50 seconds performing moves.
12s solve consists of 1.8 seconds pausing and 10.2 seconds performing moves.

Improving from 90s to 12s, pauses were reduced by 42.2 seconds and the time spent performing moves was reduced by 39.8 seconds. Eliminating pauses shaved more time off the solve than improving movecount and TPS combined.


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## mark49152 (Sep 11, 2016)

cubo said:


> Likewise, as a percentage your pausing has only moved from 40% to about 35%.


Yes, except as I have explained many times, it's nonsensical to measure pausing as a percentage. But I might just as well try to convince you the earth is round .


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## stoic (Sep 11, 2016)

cubo said:


> Considering the winning result for pause reduction in the LL, but the closer result to TPS overall, this suggests _TPS was more important than pause reduction as an improvement factor in the F2L_.


At some point you're going to have to admit to a teeny bit of confirmation bias, right?


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## aybuck37 (Sep 11, 2016)

I have bad tps and high turn moves. And i have bad lookahead rip


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## cubo (Sep 12, 2016)

JanW said:


> I realized after I wrote the post above that looking at som "improvement factor" was really bad and doesn't make any sense at all (reducing pauses from 14 to 0.7 seconds is not 10 times better than reducing from 14 to 7 seconds and reducing pauses to 0 is not an infinite improvement).
> 
> What you should look at instead is how the reductions affect the time. I doubt the 47% and 15% pausing figures are accurate for the whole solves, but let's assume they are.
> 
> ...


 I also realized something after my last post ... but my conclusion went in the opposite direction to yours  Allow me to explain.

I agree it's all about time. I also believe (and this is where my approach is different to yourself and mark49152) that the 3 factors (pausing, moves, TPS) are interconnected and influence each other.

So then I asked myself, how do our 3 factors influence time taken to complete a solve?

*Pause factor*: a factor equal to [1 divided by 'active' time expressed as a fraction of total time]. A pause factor value of 1 thus indicates no pausing, a 2 indicates 50% pausing (solve takes twice the time due to pausing), a 10 indicates 90% pausing (solve takes 10 times as long due to pausing), etc. 
_For example, if a solve takes 90 seconds, 30 seconds of which is pausing, the pause factor is 1/(60/90)=1.5. This tells us the solve took 1.5 times as long as it would have without any pausing. _

*Move factor*: a factor equal to [the number of moves]. 

*TPS factor*: a factor equal to [total moves divided by total time multiplied by the pause factor]. _This is the second of the two possible approaches mentioned above. _
With this formulation, if you double the value of any factor, the total solve time doubles. Likewise, if you halve any factor, the total time halves. Furthermore, if compare the 3 factors between 2 different solves and work out how much each factor changed, you get 3 change factors which, when multiplied together, will equal the total change in time taken between the two solves.

So going back to Marcel and applying our more rigorous method ...

*LL solves*:

1: 50 moves, 30 secs, 14 secs pausing. Pause Factor = 1/(16/30) = 1.875. TPS = 50/30*1.875 = 3.125

2: 25 moves, 4.7 secs, 0.7 secs pausing. Pause factor = 1/(4/4.7) = 1.175. TPS = 25/4.7*1.175 = 6.25

Moves improved x2 (50/25), TPS improved x2 (6.25/3.125), pausing improved x1.596 (1.875/1.175)
Total time improvement = 2 x 2 x 1.596 = 30/4.7 = 6.38
For last layer, *move reduction and TPS improvement had an equal effect*, with both greater than pause reduction.

*Whole solves* (assuming same pause rates for whole solves as for LL)

1: 108 moves, 94 secs, 44 secs pausing. Pause factor = 1/(50/94) = 1.88. TPS = 108/94*1.88 = 2.16

2: 67 moves, 12 secs, 1.8 secs pausing. Pause factor = 1/(10.2/12) = 1.18. TPS = 67/12*1.18 = 6.57

Moves improved x1.61 (108/67), TPS improved x3.04 (6.57/2.16), pausing improved x1.6 (1.88/1.18)
Total time improvement = 1.61 x 3.04 x 1.6 = 94/12 = 7.83
As so, comparing the improvement between the whole solves, *TPS was almost twice as important as move reduction or pause reduction*.
_
[ Edited to remove unnecessary brackets and double-entry of whole solve.]_



mark49152 said:


> Yes, except as I have explained many times, it's nonsensical to measure pausing as a percentage. But I might just as well try to convince you the earth is round .


 Why is it so crazy, given that everyone here keeps talking about how strongly TPS and pausing are connected via look ahead? Do you think they are completely independent factors? In other words, do you think Marcel could have simply reduced his pausing from 44 seconds to 1.8 seconds while not improving at all at TPS? I don't believe that's how cubing improvement happens. I think it happens with all 3 factors improving together, and influencing each other.



stoic said:


> At some point you're going to have to admit to a teeny bit of confirmation bias, right?


 Sure, but don't we all? The best I can do is try to stick to the facts, explain my approach as clearly as I can and be open about my assumptions.


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## AlphaSheep (Sep 12, 2016)

cubo said:


> Why is it so crazy, given that everyone here keeps talking about how strongly TPS and pausing are connected via look ahead? Do you think they are completely independent factors? In other words, do you think Marcel could have simply reduced his pausing from 44 seconds to 1.8 seconds while not improving at all at TPS? I don't believe that's how cubing improvement happens. I think it happens with all 3 factors improving together, and influencing each other.


Its crazy because every single fast cuber here had the exact opposite experience. They've had to actively concentrate on and improve each of those seperately because beyond some basic level of competence (around 30-40 seconds), TPS and pausing are very much independent, and as has already been stated, improvement in either one actually hinders improvement in the other. They absolutely do not improve together.


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## tseitsei (Sep 12, 2016)

Amazing! That cubo guy is still arguing about this. 

And still coming up with new ways to twist the numbers to "fit" his explanation despite every single advanced cuber telling him otherwise and JanW even explaining everything perfectly in his post...

I'm not even mad. That's amazing


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## cubo (Sep 12, 2016)

AlphaSheep said:


> TPS and pausing (...) absolutely do not improve together.


 Marcel's stats prove this statement is false. Taken over the period from beginner to expert cuber, they clearly _do _improve together. Even if there is a stage within that overall development where one works against the other (the famous "go fast to go slow" stage), the over-arching trend is significant improvement in both.



JanW said:


> Improving from 90s to 12s, pauses were reduced by 42.2 seconds and the time spent performing moves was reduced by 39.8 seconds. Eliminating pauses shaved more time off the solve than improving movecount and TPS combined.


 Can you please tell me, showing your model, what proportion of the 39.8 second "move count + TPS improvement" you attribute to each of those factors?



SenorJuan said:


> It's pretty obvious TPS is mainly why we are seeing todays fast solves. *The solve movecount is very similar to what it was 20 years ago, before finger-tricks and decent cubes, but the solve times are down to one third of what they were then*.


 Do any of the doubters about my theory want to address this observation?


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## h2f (Sep 12, 2016)

tseitsei said:


> Amazing! That cubo guy is still arguing about this.
> 
> And still coming up with new ways to twist the numbers to "fit" his explanation despite every single advanced cuber telling him otherwise and JanW even explaining everything perfectly in his post...
> 
> I'm not even mad. That's amazing



Agree. In my opinion cubo lost this debate many posts ago.


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## cubo (Sep 12, 2016)

mark49152 said:


> Anyway, the reason for the disagreement in this thread all comes down to how pauses are measured and expressed.
> 
> To my mind, solvetime = (movecount / TPS) + pauses. Where the unit of pauses is seconds. Fewer seconds paused is an improvement.
> 
> ...


 This is a nice summary of our disagreement.

I'll ask you the same question I asked JanW: could you show me, using the solvetime = (movecount / TPS) + pauses model, your breakdown of the roles of movecount and TPS in Marcel's overall time improvement?


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## JanW (Sep 12, 2016)

@cubo according to your latest math the 90 second solver with 30 seconds pauses improving to 9 seconds with 3 seconds pauses does not decrease pauses at all.


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## cubo (Sep 12, 2016)

JanW said:


> @cubo according to your latest math the 90 second solver with 30 seconds pauses improving to 9 seconds with 3 seconds pauses does not decrease pauses at all.


 I wouldn't say pausing hasn't decreased at all, clearly it has as a raw number, but yes I would say the pause factor is 1.33 in both cases and thus pausing contributes equally as a proportion of these total times, whereas other factors (moves and TPS, you haven't given details about the breakdown of these) contribute to the x10 overall improvement. However I would think this an unlikely scenario - it would be more likely for the speed cuber to also decrease their pause factor somewhat, as per Marcel's and Mark's actual improvement stats.

But enough about my model for a moment, since we have been over it ad nauseoum and you clearly don't agree..

Would you mind answering the question from my last post regarding your alternative explanation?


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## JanW (Sep 12, 2016)

Your "pause factor" is a completely meaningless stat. A 5 second pause is a 5 second pause. It takes just as long no matter how fast your solve is. Eliminating that pause saves as much time regardless of how fast your solve is.



cubo said:


> Would you mind answering the question from my last post regarding your alternative explanation?


What about it? For the last layer it's 50/50 as was established a long time ago. Calculating TPS for the rest of the solve is virtually impossible.


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## mark49152 (Sep 12, 2016)

cubo said:


> I'll ask you the same question I asked JanW: could you show me, using the solvetime = (movecount / TPS) + pauses model, your breakdown of the roles of movecount and TPS in Marcel's overall time improvement?


No, partly because I don't have time today, and partly because I don't think comparing those two solves is meaningful (sorry @JanW). One is so slow as to make it impossible to discern between pauses and low TPS, and the other is a 12 second outlier from an 18 second solver so is unlikely to tell you anything more than what want exceptionally well on that one stellar solve (I would bet that 0.7 seconds total pauses is not the norm, sorry Marcel ). Instead I offered you my own improvement data, based on averages and splits where I had enough information available to make sensible estimates about the three metrics.

I hope you have found the inputs on this thread enlightening, but I suspect that nothing I or anyone else can say here today will deflect you from your own certainty in your own conclusion. My suggestion would be that you go practise for a few months and come back when your times have halved, and then maybe you'll have some different insights, and be better able to understand what we're saying, having experienced it for yourself.


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## cubo (Sep 12, 2016)

JanW said:


> Your "pause factor" is a completely meaningless stat. A 5 second pause is a 5 second pause.


 Actually I've shown it's a mathematically consistent way to represent the time effect of that factor on the solve, and furthermore, can be used with the other factors to compare their relative contribution to time improvement.

I must say I'm surprised you think pausing can be magically reduced without any effect on the other elements. Your model assumes that a 100 sec, 100 move, 50% pausing beginner could, if they simply focused on look ahead and reducing pausing, become a 50 sec, 100 move, 0% pausing cuber. This goes against the evidence of both Marcel and Mark's stats, which is that all 3 factors improve together, at varying rates.

Lastly, "a 5 second pause is a 5 second pause" is as meaningless as stats get. X = X? No kidding.

_[Edit to add final thoughts ...]_

3rd time lucky? Does anyone care to explain either of these without admitting TPS is the crucial factor?



SenorJuan said:


> It's pretty obvious TPS is mainly why we are seeing todays fast solves. The solve movecount is very similar to what it was 20 years ago, before finger-tricks and decent cubes, but the solve times are down to one third of what they were then.





Rubix Cubix said:


> I think this is an interesting video that helps to prove the point that a fast TPS can be more effective than move count. As he manages to get sub-20 using the beginner method.



Actually don't bother because ...



mark49152 said:


> I hope you have found the inputs on this thread enlightening, but I suspect that nothing I or anyone else can say here today will deflect you from your own certainty in your own conclusion. My suggestion would be that you go practise for a few months and come back when your times have halved, and then maybe you'll have some different insights, and be better able to understand what we're saying, having experienced it for yourself.


 Thanks @mark49152, I'll happily take your advice. It has been enlightening, even if I've been almost entirely swimming against the current on this one.

Same goes to everyone else (@JanW, @AlphaSheep, @shadowslice e, @Escher, and all the others) ... thanks, and bye for now.


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## tseitsei (Sep 12, 2016)

This is getting ridiculous already, but I'll try one last time.

The reason I won't calculate my "breakdowns for MarcelP's solves is that in the longer solve *it is quite impossible to determine his TPS during F2L since he literally pauses after every single move. *However even during the last layer he improves as much (or more) by decreasing pauses than by increasing TPS and reducing movecount. And everybody (should obviously) understand that during the F2L is even much more important than during last layer. Last layer is the portion of the CFOP solve where you just spam algs with maximum TPS as opposed to F2L that you often solve intuitively and with lots and lots of lookahead to reduce pauses.



cubo said:


> Actually I've shown it's a mathematically consistent way to represent the time effect of that factor on the solve, and furthermore, can be used with the other factors to compare their relative contribution to time improvement.


I can show many things that are mathematically consistent but don't really make any sense in the reaö world.



> I must say I'm surprised you think pausing can be magically reduced without any effect on the other elements. Your model assumes that a 100 sec, 100 move, 50% pausing beginner could, if they simply focused on look ahead and reducing pausing, become a 50 sec, 100 move, 0% pausing cuber. This goes against the evidence of both Marcel and Mark's stats, which is that all 3 factors improve together, at varying rates.


Of course pauses aren't magically reduced just as movecount doesn't magically drop or TPS doesn't magically increase. However it makes much more sense to use an actual and absolute number for pausing rather than some arbitrary pausing factor. Since 5s pause in a 100s solve is just as long (5 seconds) as it is in a 20s solve (still 5 seconds).



> Lastly, "a 5 second pause is a 5 second pause" is as meaningless as stats get. X = X? No kidding.


See the last phrase of the above chapter. Athough I have to say that you really are the master of meaningless stats based on what I have seen in this topic.


Anyway this will proably be my last post in this thread since you have obviously decided how things are and this can't be changed by anything.

P.S. oh almost forgot this:


> > It's pretty obvious TPS is mainly why we are seeing todays fast solves. *The solve movecount is very similar to what it was 20 years ago, before finger-tricks and decent cubes, but the solve times are down to one third of what they were then*.
> 
> 
> Do any of the doubters about my theory want to address this observation?



How many people do you think actually practised speedsolving seriously 20 years ago?
That number has gone up quite a lot so that is the main reason solve times have gone down.
With more people solving you get more talented individuals and also good tutorials so that it is easier to get faster.

Yes I agree that improved hardware has played an important part here too. But the most important thing is that the whole cubing scene has grown pretty much exponentially.

Also as I have said before. Once you get ~sub-15 TPS starts to be more important since you have already reduced a lot of pausing so increases in TPS are needed to get faster. But going from 100s solver to 10s solver by far the most time will be saved by eliminating those pauses. Going from 15s solver to a 10s solver TPS might be important (even though I still think it's lookahead and no pauses but at least TPS has a bigger role than when going from 100s --> 10s).


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## sotolf2 (Sep 12, 2016)

tseitsei said:


> Yes I agree that improved hardware has played an important part here too. But the most important thing is that the whole cubing scene has grown pretty much exponentially.



A proof of this is that top level solvers can get sub 10 times even on old hardware 

Also to compare most of my solves (Averageing around 50) and slow solves of @PenguinsDontFly (sub 15s slow solves) My TPS is higher than his, but my pausing is crazy, since I still suck at lookahead. The pauses are what's keeping me down, not my TPS


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## shadowslice e (Sep 12, 2016)

shadowslice e said:


> If that's what you're doing, then I think a better title for this thread would be: "Tps improves the most in transition from beginner to world standard" or similar. I'm sure you could think of a better title in the same vein.


Just going to reiterate this because I feel like if you just changed the thread title to this or similar it would absolve you of most of your detractors.


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## mark49152 (Sep 12, 2016)

cubo said:


> It's pretty obvious TPS is mainly why we are seeing todays fast solves. *The solve movecount is very similar to what it was 20 years ago, before finger-tricks and decent cubes, but the solve times are down to one third of what they were then*.
> 
> Do any of the doubters about my theory want to address this observation?


I'm pretty much done with this thread, but I can't resist the temptation to suggest that 20 years ago they had the same TPS but paused for 2/3rds of the solve . That would explain this observation indeed. Obviously that's not true, but @SenorJuan's observation clearly is only considering overall average TPS for the solve without accounting for max TPS and pauses.

Anyway, @cubo, this is a friendly place and you're always welcome here so don't be disheartened by the disagreement. Just remember that some people have been doing this for many years, and if you come in expounding theories that go against the consensus built from years of experience it will of course feel like swimming against the current. One of the things I like about this community is the willingness to share advice and help each other and of course all the advice offered here is in positive spirit.

One last thing. Since you're interested in analysing performance and modelling improvement, this thread might appeal to you: https://www.speedsolving.com/forum/...aining-that-yields-systematic-progress.39406/


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## cubo (Sep 13, 2016)

Thanks @mark49152 I agree this is a great community with a great vibe and positive spirit. I love to challenge the status quo but I don't ever want to be disrespectful to the amazing cubers who hang out here. I'll definitely check out that other thread, thanks again!


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## AlphaSheep (Sep 13, 2016)

It's been a fun thread and I've enjoyed reading the replies. Just one last point I need to make. 



cubo said:


> Actually I've shown it's a mathematically consistent way to represent the time effect of that factor on the solve


The thing I love most about maths is how its always consistent, and you can derive almost anything from it. The thing that's most frustrating about maths is it provides absolutely no way of telling if your conclusions are physically meaningful or not.

I remember practically all of my lecturers at university constantly repeating to us to always step back and check whether or not our answers actually make sense in the real world.

Yes, you can divide the pauses by the total solve time. Yes, you get a factor that can be compared to other factors. And yes, you can say that one factor is greater than another. But thats as far as mathematics can take you. The conclusions you then draw from those comparisons are not mathematics. They are based on interpretation, and that interpretation needs to be grounded in experience gained in the real world.


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## the_chad (Sep 7, 2022)

Ruihang Xu took this thread too seriously

64/3.77=16.98TPS


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