Message #787

From: Klaus <klaus.weidinger@yahoo.com>
Subject: 3^4 in 386 twists
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:45:34 -0000

Hi everyone!

I finally finished my second solve today and I needed 386 twists. Of course I also have to thank Matthew for helping me with some parity cases. Especially the second one was really helpful.

But I have to say that the closer I come to Roice’s record, the more I have to acknowledge what a good job he has done. And if I compare my solves I think it will really be hard to cut away another 88 twists. Well, of course there was a parity which used up 22 twists and if I’m lucky I won’t encouter this in my next solve. But the rest of this 88 twists will almost be impossible to cut away with just solving even more carefully.

So here is a little comparison of my two solves:

  1. step: I really made improvements here and managed to go from 323 twists down to 76 or, with disregard to the parity, 54. That is a reduction of 76.5% (83.3%) and I’m really content with this step. I don’t think I can make any further improvements here.

  2. step: Here I needed 306 twists in my first solve and reduce it to 181 twists (-40.8%). But I didn’t improve my system. I just did this step really bad in my first solve because I only wanted to finish the 3^4 fast. But I think if I want to beat the 300 twists, I have to change my system here.

[ ;-) While writing this post I had an idea how to change my system. If it gets more efficient by this - or at least efficient enough - I can’t tell, but I do have a really good feeling about this. ;-) ]

  1. step: This step is the same as solving the 3^3, just with two little parities which both need about 5 twists to get them done. In this step I made the fewest improvements and so I only got down from 146 to 129 twists (-11.6%). However, I can’t really improve here either because if I only count the twists I needed for the solution of the 3^3 I used up 70 quarter twists, however I had many half turns in there, so it perhaps was about 50-55 twists in half turn metric, which is really good with my system.

I think I will start another solve tomorrow, but this could take even longer than my second one, because, despite the fact that I reduce twists, the solution proceeds slower and I get less and less time due to school.

btw: I broke Remi’s record on the {3}x{3} 2. I only needed 5 turns within my 5th try (I solved roughly 5 out of 10 scrambled "cubes"). However, I don’t think he will wait long to start pressing "Ctrl + F" all over again as he did with the simplex last time ;-)

Have a nice twist,
Klaus