# Commutators vs. r2 for big cubes BLD



## Mike Hughey (Nov 11, 2007)

I've always done commutators in the past for 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 BLD edges and centers. While everyone was suggesting I should switch to r2, I wasn't logged in, so I didn't get to read the suggestions, because I was busy trying r2 on a 4x4x4 BLD. I had 8 DNFs in a row (my worst run ever!) before I finally got one, but then I got 2 in a row. My times: 20:49.07 and 20.36.84. And my DNFs were all in about the same range, running 20-24 minutes.

I know everyone is saying "r2 is the way to do", but I just thought I'd share my initial thoughts from trying both.

Advantages of r2 over commutators:
1. Less thinking - it's really much more automatic. When I'm doing the edges now, I feel more like I'm doing a regular solve instead of a BLD solve; it's almost no mental work at all. I still have to think a little when breaking into new cycles, but that's just because I'm still not totally used to the method.
2. It feels like I know what I'm doing. I'm almost constantly turning, with much smaller breaks between moves. I'm thinking that, if nothing else, it would make me look more impressive to spectators in a competition.  (Not that it matters anyway at the Virginia Open, since Chris will be done with all four of his 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 solves about the same time I'm starting my second cube.)
3. It provides some double-checks that aren't there with commutators. Other than when breaking into new cycles, you solve each position on the cube exactly once. If you find yourself solving a position that you remember having solved earlier, you know you've messed up somehow with your memorization. I REALLY like this aspect of it.
4. More consistent. This is probably just an aspect of #1 above. Since there's less thinking, times are very consistent using it - every solve takes almost exactly the same time.

Advantages of commutators over r2:
1. Fewer moves. It seems to me like if you're really fast at both methods, commutators should be significantly faster. And since I've done commutators for months, I'm still fast enough that my fastest times with commutators beat my times with r2. I'm really curious what would happen for Chris Hardwick if he switched. I have this feeling that he is so good now at commutators that he'd have a hard time ever beating his commutator speed with r2, just because of the advantage in number of moves.

Overall, it seems to me like the difference between r2 and commutators is much like the difference between Fridrich and, say, Petrus (insert your favorite "thinking" method here). Fridrich makes up for the fewer moves in Petrus with the fact that the moves can be executed so fast. The same seems to be true with r2.

I'm still debating as to whether I should switch to r2 for the Virginia Open or stick with commutators. I fully expected to stick with commutators, but now I'm having second thoughts.

Anyway, I'm curious what other people think about the difference between these methods.


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## masterofthebass (Nov 11, 2007)

I would suggest that you stick with commutators for the upcoming competition. You don't want to switch methods 2 weeks before a competition. I agree that r2 is like faster for that reason. The thing is, even though that r2's move count is more than commutators, the move count is still not that high. I really wish I could figure out commutators though, because it would give me a better perspective.


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## Lucas Garron (Nov 11, 2007)

Daniel Beyer had a good idea: Since the l- and r-slice edges are not as fast for r2, use commutators when those pieces are involved. Otherwise, r2 is a pretty efficient set of concatenated commutators.
Also, I use often use a commutator when I have a 3-cycle.

I think center commutators are a bigger worry for me...


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## Mike Hughey (Nov 14, 2007)

Lucas Garron said:


> Daniel Beyer had a good idea: Since the l- and r-slice edges are not as fast for r2, use commutators when those pieces are involved. Otherwise, r2 is a pretty efficient set of concatenated commutators.
> Also, I use often use a commutator when I have a 3-cycle.



I really like this idea! I'm going to follow Dan's advice and just use commutators for the upcoming competition, but after that, I'm planning on trying this method, at least for a while. So any time I hit an l- or r-slice edge, I'll solve the next 2 pieces at once, and then I'll drop back to r2 after that until I hit the next one. It seems like there are some details that might require a little work to figure out, but it might be a really nice approach.


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## pjk (Nov 25, 2007)

It is a tough comparison. In the end, I think fewer moves will win the battle of speedsolving.


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## Mike Hughey (Nov 25, 2007)

pjk said:


> It is a tough comparison. In the end, I think fewer moves will win the battle of speedsolving.



After watching Daniel Beyer doing commutators at the Virginia Open today and seeing how amazingly fast he is at them, I guess I have to agree. I can clearly see there's lots of room for me to improve there; I might as well keep going with commutators after all. (Wow, Daniel does commutators fast!)


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## Pedro (Nov 25, 2007)

Mike Hughey said:


> pjk said:
> 
> 
> > It is a tough comparison. In the end, I think fewer moves will win the battle of speedsolving.
> ...



what about Chris? I guess he's also pretty fast with commutators


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## dbeyer (Nov 26, 2007)

Yes, Pedro 

Dude, Mike. Don't talk me up so much man. I didn't even practice for the competition. I just showed up, just because I love the environment of a competition.

Seriously, there is more to big cubes blind than the move-count solving. It's rather daunting to some, stephan's M2 variations can make make solving cubes very fast.

There is memorization, recall, execution, move count, delays, systems and methods, and practice ... practice ... PRACTICE!

In my humble opinion, do what you like best, if you can settle for the basics of a 3 look last layer, and you just want to shave the seconds, by triggering a few OLLs, and really working on your from different angles PLL, great!

Or you could have a lesser PLL repitoire, and know full OLL, and intuitively solve F2L.

You could just work on getting F2L sub 7, and then hope for LL skips in competition, haha ...

Will figuring out every cycle very slowly and on the fly, without any real comprehension on the concept of commutators beat out r2? No.

Will doing so many akward setups on commutators because you only know one commutator beat out r2 in move count? No.

If you are a speedcuber, of course you'll want to learn a full system. If you're really fast with what you've already learned. Like learning CFOP, shaving the miliseconds to sub 15, then you'll move onto a larger system sorta like x-cross, slanting, multislotting, edge control, COLL, ZBf2l, ZBLL.

On the other hand, if you're a blindfolded cuber. You'll start off with a beginners method, and you'll move on. Trust me commutators were such a hinderance to me too. Especially corners. Now I love the idea of them. I used to swear that a certain approach was stupid, why not just do this. Now I've come to realize, that both that approach and mine were stupid. 

Well that's just my opinion, I shared it. Everybody loves r2, just because it'll help them get their names on a small list in the WCA records. If that's all that you want, so be it. Everybody seems to think that big cubes blind is so hard. Well, yes if you let it intimidate you and you don't practice, or even attempt it then yes. Get your hands dirty, and have at it, and don't give up after a try or two. The biggest obsticle in the way of your personal achievements is yourself. 

Everybody wants to solve a 4x4 blindfolded, but they don't want to practice. That's like wanting to win the lottery, but being to damned cheap to buy a lottery ticket.

I guess I wasn't done, but now I am.

Later,
Daniel Beyer


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## magicsquares (Nov 26, 2007)

Sorry for this stupid question but what's r2? Is that like applying M2 to big cubes?


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## masterofthebass (Nov 26, 2007)

Yes, I think that r2 was the original method, which was adapted to the 3x3 as M2, but yeah, it's the same idea. 

I just started doing 4x4 BLD because I had trouble with the centers. It was mainly my comprehension of how freestyling commutators work. Now that I have no trouble on the centers, I'm thinking about their use for the edges. I've been using r2 because I use M2 for the 3x3. After playing around with using commutators, the low move count seems like it can be advantageous with a lot of practice. r2 Definitely seems to be the easier of the two, but commutators may win out in the long run if you dedicate enough time.


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## Mike Hughey (Nov 26, 2007)

Pedro said:


> what about Chris? I guess he's also pretty fast with commutators



Yes, he's certainly also fast at commutators. My disadvantage there was that I didn't get a chance to actually watch Chris do any commutators up close. (I was always busy focusing on memorizing while Chris was doing his big cubes BLD solves.) But Daniel was showing me a few commutators on my cube in between the big cube BLD solves, and I never saw them go so fast. I'm sure Chris is just as fast or faster; I just didn't get to really watch him do them. But after watching Daniel, I now realize my best bet for improvement through practicing is probably to practice commutators with my eyes open, to get my speed up. As it is, I typically do about 2 moves in the time it takes Daniel to do all 8 for a commutator. Assuming I'm really comfortable with it.



dbeyer said:


> Dude, Mike. Don't talk me up so much man. I didn't even practice for the competition. I just showed up, just because I love the environment of a competition.



Sorry - I was just impressed watching you do the commutators. I had never seen them go so fast, so it made quite an impression.

I'll probably experiment with both r2 and commutators (and maybe other methods, if I find them) off and on, just for fun. I really like learning different methods, so there's no reason not to do that. But I have a feeling after this weekend that I'm going to mainly focus on getting faster at commutators, instead of r2.

And I'm looking forward to working on commutators for corners. It seems like a fun way to do them.


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## cmhardw (Nov 26, 2007)

I'm interested in this discussion, and wanted to post some info about commutators and see if it helps, because I too would like to know if one method is better than the other.

For me on the 4x4x4 a really fast solving phase, for BLD, is around 2:30. If I am having a good day and focusing well I can get sub-3 pretty easily usually around 2:45-2:59. If I am having some trouble recalling, or if I am having trouble focusing, I can get times around 3:30-4:00. My worst times are when I forgot an image or a location and have to search through all images with my remaining unused letters and I can take up to 8 minutes for the solving phase alone when this happens.

At the Virginia Open for my 6:20 on 4x4 I memorized in 3:03 and so my solving phase was 3:17, so even under pressure I can still get times at least close to 3 minutes. At Worlds for my 12:01 4x4 solve I memorized in about 3:30 but forgot 2 entire locations (6 images or 6 cycles) and had to search my unused letters for them so the solving phase took me 8:30 basically.

For the 5x5x5 I can very frequently get a solving phase of under 8 minutes, usually in the middle range of the 7's or 7:15-7:45. My best solves are sub-7 in the 6:50's and my personal best is 6:46 on a successful solve. When I am not focusing well that day I get solves around 8-9 minutes and when I forget a location or an image and have to search the remaining unused letters I can take 12-13 minutes for the solving phase alone.

If anyone could post their solving data on r2 methods I would be very interested to see it, as again I don't care which method I use I just want to use the fastest one. I strongly believe with the information available to me now that commutators are at least equally as fast as, but hopefully faster than (on average), r2 with all the optimizations that Daniel has done and has got me working on as well ;-) But again I would be happy to be proven wrong, and I would *very* strongly consider switching to r2 rather than commutators if that were the case 

Chris

P.S. Congrats to Mike for your successful big cube BLD solves in competition! Sorry we didn't get as much time to talk BLD, but it was very nice to meet you in person! Hopefully I'll see you again at Chattahoochee or Nationals, or both!

And many thanks to Daniel too for all those crazy commutator optimizations, and for getting me started on trying to optimize the ones I use too ;-)


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## masterofthebass (Nov 26, 2007)

I just did a couple of edge solves, including parity fixing. My entire solves are not usually reliable, and my center's take a while. These times are relative to if my memorization is pretty much perfect during a real solve.

1:26.50
1:39.44
2:14.33 (parity)

first one was ridiculously easy, and the second was pretty easy too. Not too sure how much this is going to help people...


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## Mike Hughey (Nov 26, 2007)

cmhardw said:


> P.S. Congrats to Mike for your successful big cube BLD solves in competition! Sorry we didn't get as much time to talk BLD, but it was very nice to meet you in person! Hopefully I'll see you again at Chattahoochee or Nationals, or both!



Thanks very much, Chris - it was a real pleasure getting to meet you as well. Your 4x4x4 time was amazing! I know you were helping out a lot with the event (which I appreciate; I would like to have helped out, but it would have been kind of hard to do with my family there), so I understand why we didn't have much time to talk. We'll see how soon I get to another competition. It's hard to bring my whole family, but now that the girls have tasted competition (and my wife, for that matter), maybe it will be easier to get them motivated to come.



dbeyer said:


> Everybody seems to think that big cubes blind is so hard.


I'd like to think that my recent success with them has a little to do with why they're getting so popular now all of a sudden. I know there was already a big move towards them before I got involved, but I figure everyone can see I'm a pretty mediocre cuber overall, and yet even I can do them, so it must not be all THAT hard.


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## magicsquares (Nov 27, 2007)

Just wanna know... Where can I find a tutorial or something like that on r2.


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## masterofthebass (Nov 27, 2007)

http://erikku.er.funpic.org/rubik/


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## cmhardw (Nov 27, 2007)

Here are some times for 4x4 edges only using commutators. I did these as standard BLD solves, only just on edges. I did not solve the centers first before memorizing. The first time is the total time including memorization, and the second time is the solving phase alone.

1) 3:15 ; 1:25
2) DNF (3:30 ; 1:28)
3) 3:30 ; 1:22
4) 2:57 ; 1:25
5) DNF (3:02; 1:40)
6) 4:24 ; 1:59 (QRES)(NHUDVBWJ)(ICXK)(MPLFGT)(AO)
7) 3:43 ; 1:46
8) DNF (3:35; 1:32)
9) 3:31; 1:34
10) 3:58; 1:46

I listed the edge permutation for solve number 6, because it was by far the hardest for me to memorize of these 10 solves. In general I don't break into new cycles for bigger cubes edges, so if I get lots of disjoint cycles that is a hard case for me. Solve number 6 represents my worst case solves in general fairly well I would say.

Averaging all 7 of my successful solves gives 1:37 average solving time for edges using commutators. Again these solves were all done actually as blindfolded solves, so this is a realistic representation of my edges solving during a real solve.

Chris


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## masterofthebass (Nov 27, 2007)

So Chris is as good at commutators as I my best r2s. I did those couple of solves blindfolded as well, but I solved the centers. My memo times are horrible so I didn't think I should count those. I've only been really practicing r2 for the past couple of weeks, so I guess that with a lot of practice, I think r2 can come out on top.


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## Mike Hughey (Nov 27, 2007)

It would seem that might be the case, yes. I still think it might be that the best might be to take the best of both worlds, as was mentioned above - use r2, but switch to commutators when you have pieces in the center slices.

You guys are both amazing to be able to do them that fast. I've gotten a lot faster at them; I haven't got any actual times right now, but I'd say I now average about 5 minutes to memorize the edges and another 5 to solve them. Edges are definitely my slow spot on the 4x4x4, though - they're easily half the total work.


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## masterofthebass (Nov 27, 2007)

I guess doing M2 for the 3x3 helps with my speed for r2. For the M slice edges, I think that doing commutators for them probably would help my times because instead of doing that long flip algorithm, you just use a commutator. I've played around with edge commutators a little bit, but I still have to know them in order to use them in a solve.


Edit...
I just tried a scramble and came across a situation that I don't know how to handle right of the bat. In my buffer (FD) is DF, and then in DF is DB. These are all in the r and l slices. I'm not sure how to do these commutators. If one of you guys could help me out with that, that would be great.


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## Mike Hughey (Nov 27, 2007)

masterofthebass said:


> I just tried a scramble and came across a situation that I don't know how to handle right of the bat. In my buffer (FD) is DF, and then in DF is DB. These are all in the r and l slices. I'm not sure how to do these commutators. If one of you guys could help me out with that, that would be great.



I would probably do (L' l') as a setup move, then [D b D', F2] (in other words, D b D' F2 D b' D' F2), then undo the setup move.


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## Lucas Garron (Nov 28, 2007)

masterofthebass said:


> Edit...
> I just tried a scramble and came across a situation that I don't know how to handle right of the bat. In my buffer (FD) is DF, and then in DF is DB. These are all in the r and l slices. I'm not sure how to do these commutators. If one of you guys could help me out with that, that would be great.



Do you know how to shoot BU (UB?), by flipping an edge?
This is similar, I'd do:
x [r, flip UF without affecting the l or r slice] x'

Or try it this way: x2 [r, shoot UB] x2'
I'd do: x2 r (U R' U' B' R2 B) r' (B' R2' B U R U') x2'


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## masterofthebass (Nov 28, 2007)

I didn't know how to flip UF except for the algorithm that erik uses for the l slice edges. I figured that it wouldn't be much faster for me to do it that way than using straight r2. I just didn't know the commutator for it.


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## abunickabhi (Nov 15, 2015)

r2 is very fast on big cubes.....with move cancellations...its 5.5 moves per piece


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## JamesDanko (Nov 15, 2015)

abunickabhi said:


> r2 is very fast on big cubes.....with move cancellations...its 5.5 moves per piece



8 years bro, you're a little late to the party on this one.


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## Ollie (Nov 15, 2015)

OrangeCuber said:


> 8 years bro, you're a little late to the party on this one.



He says to the official AsR holder for 5BLD.


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## mark49152 (Nov 15, 2015)

abunickabhi said:


> r2 is very fast on big cubes.....with move cancellations...its 5.5 moves per piece


What solutions did you count for the l and r slices?


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## Goosly (Nov 15, 2015)

mark49152 said:


> What solutions did you count for the l and r slices?



Probably using advanced r2.

Example: Fd Ru
(l' U2) r2 B L' B' r2 B L B' (U2 l)
which is 6 moves per piece.

Other example: Bu Fl
(B) U' L U r2 U' L2 U r2 U' L U (B')
which is 6.5 moves per piece.

I'm not sure how he got the 5.5 average though


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## mark49152 (Nov 16, 2015)

Goosly said:


> Probably using advanced r2.


That's a nice trick for the l slice pieces, thanks.


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## MatejMuzatko (Dec 19, 2015)

Goosly said:


> Probably using advanced r2.
> 
> Example: Fd Ru
> (l' U2) r2 B L' B' r2 B L B' (U2 l)
> ...


He probably got that average by using better solutions... Or more advanced, using r and r' interchanges which probably doesn't 
Bu Fl can be done (L' U) B' R B r2 B' R' B r2 (U' L) which is 6 moves per piece 
Or (U2) D' L D r' D' L' D r (U2) which is 5 moves per piece but I wouldn't count it as r2 obviously, it's r', but it's using the same principles 

Odesláno z mého thl 4000 pomocí Tapatalk


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