# Letter Quads discussion



## abunickabhi (Oct 22, 2020)

This thread is created for people who are planning to memo some chunk as a group of four letters. There are 126,720 letter quads for all possible edge cases on the 3x3, so its a big zoo/farm that we have to make up to have a complete system. 

In this thread, discussing difficult Letter Quads which could not be classified into a person, action or object/mnemonic is intended. Also how to get efficient and reach the fluency level as letter pairs is expected. Any techniques to do that will be appreciated?

P.S. *My personal path as of 2020 end:* I have about 65000 letter quads familiar and have them up in an excel sheet. I try to use them in MBLD, as 3BLD is mostly audio and images. I started making Letter Quads early in 2017. No idea when I will achieve fluency in making letter quad sentences.


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## TheSlykrCubr (Oct 22, 2020)

how about replacing certain bad letters with digraphs eg. X = SH, Q = CH etc.


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## abunickabhi (Nov 1, 2020)

I did a Letter Quads experiment today, it was useful in revising all random LQs if they pop up.


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## abunickabhi (Nov 1, 2020)

TheSlykrCubr said:


> how about replacing certain bad letters with digraphs eg. X = SH, Q = CH etc.


I am not focussing on audio memo here. People already use quads for edge audio memo. I am talking about letter quads PAO for solid information reduction while memoing big cubes and for MBLD.


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## abunickabhi (Nov 22, 2020)

Reaching about 70,000 known letter quads. Never thought I would reach this number when I started out in 2017, and I had the first had the idea of LQ in 2014.


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## abunickabhi (Nov 29, 2020)

Video of me browsing through the entire letter quads catalogue yo,


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## abunickabhi (Dec 22, 2020)

Interesting discussion on the Yo notation:

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/3920-notation/37257


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## qwr (Dec 22, 2020)

but why? what is wrong with letter pairs


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## Filipe Teixeira (Dec 22, 2020)

I admire your commitment. I wish I had your persistence with memory techniques

teach me master. any tips to a complete noob?


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## Jam88 (Dec 22, 2020)

65k done??!! Wow, you could learn 1LLL in a month with that commitment


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## BenChristman1 (Dec 22, 2020)

How do you do audio with a letter quad? Wouldn’t it be really hard to find a word that has certain 4 letters in it?


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## abunickabhi (Dec 27, 2020)

BenChristman1 said:


> How do you do audio with a letter quad? Wouldn’t it be really hard to find a word that has certain 4 letters in it?


Yep the general vocabulary of a person is in the thousands, so we know few thousands objects and actions clearly give or take. 
If you are a knowledge freak, you might know more historic people, stuff from around the world and make up the void needed to fill out all the letter quads.

It is hard to complete the letter quad set and there is still a bunch of quads for which I cannot find a useful mnemonic. But overall I think it is doable.
Audio letter quads is not that effective for MBLD as it does not stick for long. It is useful for memoing 3BLD edges though and some top solvers use audio quads.

Person or action or object letter quads is a complete different thing though and gets a lot of preparation to get all the quads assigned to something and have a workable system.


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## abunickabhi (Dec 27, 2020)

Jam88 said:


> 65k done??!! Wow, you could learn 1LLL in a month with that commitment


1LLL is a bit more complex in recognition as edges and corners are together. Recognition for BLD cases is super easy as it is just the letter pair or the letter quad. Also the alg for 3-cycles and 5-cycles is easy as it can be written out in Yo notation and it makes sense. But in the case of 1LLL, and some 2gen cases in that, writing in Yo notation doesnt help as it will just be a string which looks like jaajjcjcjcc which is meaningless to memorise.

Lastly, average movecount of 5-cycles is 10.5 STM which is a few moves lesser than 1LLL I guess. The algs are a bit easier on the BLD end I guess.
That's why many pro all-rounders feel that ZBLL is harder than 3-style when they learn both. Same applies to 1LLL and 5-style.


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## abunickabhi (Dec 27, 2020)

Filipe Teixeira said:


> I admire your commitment. I wish I had your persistence with memory techniques
> 
> teach me master. any tips to a complete noob?


Like if you already have a working letter pair system, next step can be PAO letter pairs.
Then maybe you try audio letter quads, and just make a list of super common 4-letter words like rest,fest,nest,were, veto, nike, bike, hats etc. And hope that they popup in your memo sometime.


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## GenTheThief (Dec 27, 2020)

While I haven't even learned it yet, from the few videos I've seen on the topic, this seems sort of like stenography cords. I suppose 3BLD is already sort of like that, but 4 letters now, the resemblance is even clearer.

This is really cool! I'm so glad that your investigating new ways to improve BLD techniques. Would these work well in conjunction with 5-style?


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## abunickabhi (Jan 4, 2021)

GenTheThief said:


> While I haven't even learned it yet, from the few videos I've seen on the topic, this seems sort of like stenography cords. I suppose 3BLD is already sort of like that, but 4 letters now, the resemblance is even clearer.
> 
> This is really cool! I'm so glad that your investigating new ways to improve BLD techniques. Would these work well in conjunction with 5-style?


5-style and letter quads are completely different works. If a person chooses to do 5-style, he can continue memoing as letter pairs, or if a person uses letter quads, he can still use 3-style algs.

Letter quads are quite effective after you reach the critical mass of knowing them. You have to know a lot of them before you start using them fluently in your solves. I started making letter quad images in 2016, and I am still less fluent as compared to letter pairs. There is 102k letter quads I have discovered, and had a rough object, linguistic idea or image associated with it, U' f' L' S L S' L' S L F U.


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## abunickabhi (Jan 21, 2021)

qwr said:


> but why? what is wrong with letter pairs


There is nothing wrong with letter pairs. They are quite good, and I used them for over 6 years fluently.

The problem I am trying to solve here is of reduction of information. If I have a letter quad implying an object, say FGCD -fog cloud, I will just have to visualize one object instead of the two object that I need to do for letter pairs FG- faggot, CD-compact disc. So, there is reduction in mental effort here, hence the attempt to complete LQs.

On a side note, I just completed annotating 105k Letter Quads. Took me a little over 4 years to reach this stage, L F2 E' F E F L' !


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## qwr (Jan 21, 2021)

I see. Well I don't really see it as a reduction in mental effort because I think I would confuse myself.


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## abunickabhi (Jan 22, 2021)

qwr said:


> I see. Well I don't really see it as a reduction in mental effort because I think I would confuse myself.


I would disagree here, if you are not comfortable with the new and bigger system, it is definitely confusing. LQs were confusing for me from 2016-19. Now I am finally about to have a clear mind about it, and I observe a reduction in mental effort over letter pairs.

So TLDR, it took over 4 years for me to make sure the new system is well prepared (100k objects) and I am able to make images, and reduce the information that I have to memorise. Its tough to explain to a person who has never gone through this process though ngl.


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## abunickabhi (Mar 15, 2021)

Completed 109.5k Letter quads yay, and about half of those are annotated.

My progress with letter quads each year,
end of 2014, *- 0 letter quads* had a brief thought about letter quads, but did not give it attention as my letter pairs were not good enough. I thought letter quads will be too much work and infeasible af at my current given level. 

end of 2016 *- 5k letter quads* all the easy MU gen algs and setup to that discovered and listed out, referred to Ishaan's algs and Oleg's algs and added them to my sheet. 

end of 2017 - *23k letter quads, * refuted viability of 5cycle corners, and focus now only on edges. Made a subset of 5-cycles only for Roux LSE. 

end of 2018 - *48k letter quads, * stopped genning DF buffer and focus solely on UF5. Discussion with Yongqiang peng, regarding the derivation of various categories of 5-cycles and mathematics of it (most of the comms are not of the form [A,B]). 

end of 2019 - *58k letter quads, * very less free time this year hence only 10k+ LQs added. Also I did not have a laptop, and had to save money to buy one so that I could start genning again. Drilling of algs, and comparing times with 2 3-style exec. 

end of 2020 - *104k letter quads, * thanks lockdown for creating lot of time. Coded some software for 5-style Yo notation, reconstructions, cube images, latex pdf export, keyboard cube trainer. Completed 17k UF5 algs which rotationless,speed optimal and have 0-2 regrips. March 2021- Currently at *109.5k letter quads* done!!! Yippee, near completion. All mirrors and inverses checked.


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## abunickabhi (Mar 23, 2021)

Crossed 110k today,

Also this cool video of me trying to explain how I memo using LQs,


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## abunickabhi (Mar 31, 2021)

Finished the creative addition of the first set of letter quads of 26k.

So, for each letter quad, I have either a person, action, object, place, language literal, feeling or acronym. I label that along with describing each letter quad in detail.

The more clear and distinct letter quads I have, the more chance of me, able to pull off accelerated memos.


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## abunickabhi (Apr 11, 2021)

Crossed 110.5k annotated letter quads today! Took 18 days to add 500 more cases. (much slower than the corona spread for sure)


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## abunickabhi (Apr 23, 2021)

111k letter quads cases out of the possible 126.7k possible cases. The progression pace has been steady. Now my task is to fine tune the image that I have each letter quad and make it more vivid and creative.

At this pace, 112k will happen by last week of May 2021.


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## Cubing Forever (Apr 23, 2021)

abunickabhi said:


> View attachment 15501
> 
> 111k letter quads cases out of the possible 126.7k possible cases. The progression pace has been steady. Now my task is to fine tune the image that I have each letter quad and make it more vivid and creative.
> 
> At this pace, 112k will happen by last week of May 2021.


When you started generating 5 style algs and LQs in 2017, did you expect this many quads to be completed in 4 years?


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## abunickabhi (Apr 23, 2021)

Cubing Forever said:


> When you started generating 5 style algs and LQs in 2017, did you expect this many quads to be completed in 4 years?


I expected to complete it by end of 2020.
I was definitely not on pace in the year 2018 and 2019 as my Master's degree ate a lot of time.
But thankfully to the pandemic, I was able to cover more ground and I am pretty much near my prediction.

In 2017, I also expected to complete more letter quads than good UF5 algs, as making images is easier compared to mouse click spam in cube explorer.


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## abunickabhi (May 6, 2021)

111.5k crossed. Lets go!


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## abunickabhi (May 10, 2021)

112k crossed, the target for this month. Binged a lot of excel sheet this weekend, so faster progress yo.


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## abunickabhi (May 17, 2021)

112.5k LQs crossed today. I am quite happy with my pacing this month.


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## abunickabhi (May 22, 2021)

113k Letter Quads crossed. 
My brain feels more organised than ever.

Big thanks to 180 people who regularly contribute to making images and mnemonics for these LQs to make them lively.


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## abunickabhi (May 24, 2021)

This is the progress that I have been tracking since I started with Letter quads in November 2016. 
There are about 30ish data points that I collected(non-uniformly) over the years, and I thought it will cool to interpret the plot.

There were less data points that I collected in the year 2018, and also I plateaued in2019 as I was super busy with work/study. At the end of the curve, you see an explosion and that is due to the free time that was created because of the pandemic.

(Note, this is just my progress curve with first pass over the letter quads. I am not having uniform recall of images, and the corresponding 5-cycles for each case, and to make this uniformity happen is another uphill task to do. But it is always cool to see to progress that we do in first pass.)


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## abunickabhi (May 28, 2021)

113.6k crossed today, pacing is super good.


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## abunickabhi (Jun 4, 2021)

crossed 114.25k today, pacing has been 68 letter quads a day so far.

Edit, 114.5k crossed on 8th June 2021,


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## abunickabhi (Jun 14, 2021)

almost getting close to near completion yay!


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## abunickabhi (Jun 20, 2021)

115.5k letter quads done yay!


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## abunickabhi (Jun 23, 2021)

116k done, closing in!


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## Filipe Teixeira (Jun 23, 2021)

crazy.


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## abunickabhi (Jul 22, 2021)

116.5k crossed today. The progress has been slower over the last month as I have moved to another city and have tons of stuff to figure out.


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## Megaminx lover (Jul 22, 2021)

Only 10113 more to go. The amount of dedication is incredible.


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## abunickabhi (Aug 8, 2021)

I would just like to thank all the people who have been helping me search out good letter quads in many languages.
A big shoutout to them.

https://www.speedsolving.com/threads/daily-letter-quads.80224/

This is where all the contribution happens (along with the 5-style discord ofcourse).


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## abunickabhi (Sep 19, 2021)

117k crossed. Progress has been slow as my research job eats up most of my time.


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## abunickabhi (Nov 8, 2021)

I am planning to outsource the 35k Letter quad images that I have made over the past 5 years.
Most of the images will be objects that exist locally to me, or have some regional clue related to Marathi. I hope people outside India will be able to make sense out of it.

On the other hand, I have annotated 117,761 letter quads right now. I am almost there. The fluidity of letter quads during tracing is also improving a lot. Its a snowball effect in improvement.


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## abunickabhi (Dec 5, 2021)

118,056 letter quads learnt currently. Let's go


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## abunickabhi (Jan 11, 2022)

Progress has been slow from my end. Lot of people on the 5-style discord has keeping the dev work alive and contributing to make new and creative letter quads. Most of the letter quads are in various languages like English, French, German, Albanian, Bahasa Indo, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Sanskrit, Polish etc. I get to learn a lot of words.


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## abunickabhi (Jan 26, 2022)

118,500 letter quads exist in my database now.
I did revision of 30k of them this month. Was super tiring and energy sapping for sure.


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## abunickabhi (Feb 5, 2022)

Elliot Kobelansky briefly went over letter quads and using it in edge memo. Cool thoughts from him


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## abunickabhi (Apr 17, 2022)

Crossed 120,500 today, yay!

For reference there are 126,720 possible edge cases that are pure 5-cycles from one buffer.


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## abunickabhi (Jun 9, 2022)

121.5 letter quads done yo!


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## abunickabhi (Jun 11, 2022)

Imsoosm said:


> How many are left till you finish?


There are 126.72k for edges, so only a bit more to go.


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## abunickabhi (Jul 3, 2022)

Not able to find good images for these letter quads, any help/contribution will be appreciated:


AOGJ
AOGM
XVUO
XVUN


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## abunickabhi (Aug 28, 2022)

Just a quick update as to where I am at now, 125634/126720 which means 99.14% of the cases are covered!

Alg learning is a more involved process than making images and associations for LQs. Alg learning currently is at 31k algs and 6k algs with good review.


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## abunickabhi (Jan 5, 2023)

Cleaned a bunch of letter quads in the last few months and actually went backwards in my LQ count to roughly 125300. 

People continue to help me in the 5-style discord with creative associations for each letter quad. Super grateful to these cubers!


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