How the Speed Cubing Community Turned Rubik's Cube into a Competitive Genre

It's coming. I know it's the last what one of the last sessions of the day, so thank you for turning up. Uh you've come to a talk about Rubik's Cubes at a game developers conference, so congratulations. In 1982 there's an estimated 100 million to 1 billion Rubik's Cubes in the world, including counterfeits. Uh and it's easy to see why. They're they're very interesting to look at. They are fun to hold and to twist. It's immediately obvious what the goal is. It's immediately obvious what the tools are at your disposal to to reach that goal. But it's also incredibly incredibly hard to solve. And by the end of 1982, everyone who wanted to buy a Rubik's Cube had bought one and they had all figured out that they couldn't solve it. So they went on uh people's bookshelves and uh the sales dried up almost overnight.

But today, people meet in hotel convention centers all over the world to see who can solve it fastest. It's a real hobby with a global governing body and a vibrant and growing player base. So how did it go from a dead toy to what it is today? I'm Andrew. Uh I've been a developer since 2004, but for the purposes of this talk, my credentials are that I can solve a Rubik's Cube in 26.4 seconds. We're going to talk a little bit today about what speed cubing is. Uh and then most of the talk I'm going to spend on how it became a thing all on its own without any kind of corporate body pushing it as a thing. So first of all, if you want to talk about speed cubing, we need to talk a little bit about how to solve a Rubik's Cube. I don't want to um spoil the joy for any of you if you choose to leave here and like try and discover how to solve a Rubik's Cube for yourself. Uh but I do want to cover some of the basic fundamentals for how we're going

to uh how we're going to solve it. Let's get my little laser pointer. So the first thing the first thing most people do when they try and solve a Rubik's Cube, and what everyone did in the '80s, was get one face, all the stickers matching on one face, think they're making one sixth of the progress towards solving the cube, and then discover that doing the next face is actually incredibly hard. And the the problem that they've uh that they hit upon was that they they were solving the stickers rather than solving the pieces. So there were three different types of pieces on a on a Rubik's Cube they're called cubelets. There were three different types of cubelets. There are these center pieces here. And you can see there's three we can see, the yellow, the orange, and the green. There are the edge pieces that have two stickers, like these ones. And there were corner pieces that have three stickers. Now, when we manipulate the cube, all we can do is turn the face of the cube. And when we turn the face of a cube one of the faces, we see the center piece stays still. All these pieces around here stay still.

And then these pieces around the edge move. And it's the same on this face. Like if we turn this face, this orange center piece will stay absolutely still. These pieces will move, and then these pieces all around the edge will stay still. So there's not actually any way, any manipulation you can make to this cube that will move those center pieces. They're fixed relative to each other. Green will always be next to orange, will always be next to yellow. And so the only thing we have to actually have to do to solve the cube is get these edge pieces and these corner pieces in the right place. And uh in each one, they already have an identified place they should be. So if we look at this edge piece here, it has two stickers. It has green and it has yellow, so it must go between the green center and the yellow center. So it must go exactly here. There's only one piece that can go in that slot, and there's only one slot for that piece to go into. Same with the corner piece. It has three stickers. We can see it's got green and orange, so it must go between these two green and orange centers. We see it's also got white, but this is the yellow face. So we can intuit that the white must be

on the bottom here, and this corner piece must go here into the slot. And then we're simply going to solve it layer by layer. So when you solve the first layer of a cube, it looks a bit like this. You can see those edge cuz we've solved pieces instead of stickers, you can see those sides of the cube uh have that satisfying T shape to them. And most people, given enough time, can intuit how to do this step on their own. The second stage is to move the middle pieces down into the the the edge pieces down into the middle layer. And you can see there's only four of them that have to go in to complete that. Two thirds of the cube are completed. And most people, given more time, can complete this second step. The last step is to correctly position and orientate all of the pieces in the last layer, which is incredibly difficult and has loads of edge cases, and you have no scratch space to do it into. So if I were if I were you and I you were interested in getting a Rubik's Cube, I would try and intuit these first two steps, and especially if you're interested more in the speed cubing than

anything else than than the the puzzle nature of it, then I would just skip the third step and look up a solution. But speed cubers aren't intuiting how to solve the cube every time they do a speed solve. I'm not doing that in I couldn't do that in 30 seconds. We're using several tools in order to get us to that step. And one of the first tools we're using is algorithms. So we're breaking the solve down into many individual steps. You've already seen some of them, first layer, middle layer, last layer, but then you can break it down even further. And so you recognize the current step you're on, you know the step you want to be on next, and then you will have memorized the exact moves, the exact turns that get you from this sub-step to the next sub-step, and that's called an algorithm. And it uses this notation you can see along the bottom of the slide here, which is just telling you exactly which face to turn and how far to turn it. Uh and this algorithm we're looking at is taking that middle piece down into the right. So when you have a piece on the top layer that you need to you know needs to go down into the right, you just execute these steps and it will be down into the right, and you the rest of

the cube won't be disturbed. So algorithms, learn um you have to learn them. Uh a beginner probably needs to know half a dozen algorithms in order to finish uh finish the cube. The best speed cubers in the world will probably know hundreds of algorithms, if not thousands of algorithms. And it's just about practice, repetition, like ingraining it in your memory. And then the next step is executing those algorithms really fast. This is called turns per second or TPS. The best cubers will have upwards of 10 uh their solves will have upwards of 10 turns in every second. And that's a matter of manipulating the cube in such a way that you don't have to regrip and let go and move your hands, cuz that's the slowest thing you can do when you're manipulating the cube is to turn it around in your hands, try and get your hand on the top to turn the top. So speed cubers use their fingers and their thumbs and every digit to manipulate the cube on all the faces without having to regrip. And again, practice, muscle memory, repetition. And we're aiming to reach this point of automaticity or overlearning, where

you know what you're executing so well that it can kind of just do it by itself, just the way when you're driving a car, you can uh you can turn left without having to think about slowing down and using the gears and indicating and moving the steering wheel. You just turn left and carry on with your conversation while you're doing it. So we're overlearning and um getting this level of automaticity so we can do this next step, which is look ahead. In look ahead, the idea is that as you're executing an algorithm and moving to the next step, you can already be looking at the cube and trying to figure out what the step after that is going to be and what the next algorithm is going to be. So you can queue it up, and as soon as you finish executing one algorithm, you go straight into the next algorithm. In this GIF, there is a very slight pause where this speed solver, who does like a 10-second solve, this speed solver has uh breaks down look ahead just there. They didn't do enough look ahead. They have to stop, waste time, and look at

the cube without doing like the the cube is completely static for like a second while they figure out what the next state or what the next algorithm is going to be. With good look ahead, that would never happen. It would just be that every solve would just be a constant flow of moves. So that's how you solve really fast. So how do you solve really fast in competition? This is Feliks Zemdegs, who's probably what definitely the greatest living speed cuber we have at the moment. This is him setting the world record in 2018. This isn't actually the current world record. The current world record is held by Yusheng Du of China, who set a record of four of 3.47 seconds. He can solve the Rubik's Cube faster than I can say 3.47 seconds. Uh but unfortunately there's no good video of that one, so you've got this 4.22 record instead. So every competition is run exactly the same. The first step is your Rubik's Cube is taken away. It's a random scramble is applied to it. It's brought back to you hidden under a cup. You can see the cup to the right of this GIF when it starts.

It's brought to you under a cup, and then the cup is lifted, and you're given 15 seconds to pick up and look at the cube. And the best speed cubers now will be plotting their first 10 or 15 moves out as they're looking at the step. Then you put the cube down again. You put your hands on the timing buttons, which Feliks is going to do now. Take your hands off. Now the timer has started. Solve it as fast as you can, get it back on the mat, put your hands back on the buttons. The second you get your hand back on the button, the timer stops, and that is your time. You do that five times with five different scrambles. And when you've finished, we take your best scramble and your worst scramble, we throw away those times, and you take the mean average of the remaining time, and that is your average of five. And the competition is simply who has the best average of five. So you put all together and you have what I think is a sport. Uh Bennett Foddy in his GDC talk in 2014 talked about the three characteristics that he thinks makes a the a sport, and he talked about integrity, which is there's no easy way

to cheat, and there's no easy way to buy your way to the top. And if you don't know the scramble, there's no easy way to glitch your cube into the correct state fast. And uh you can buy the best speed cube in the world, it'll cost you the the price of a AAA console game, and it won't take you from a 1-minute solve to a 10-second solve. So, it has integrity. The second is stakes, and that doesn't necessarily mean uh big winners' checks, although that helps, but it means is there an easy way where I can compare my performance to someone else's performance and know who won. And because we have the average of five score and your personal best, that's very very easy. So, we have stakes. And the last one is performance, and that's the idea of uh I know how to do I know what I need to do, but not how to do it. And also this aspect of uh how someone's 30-second solve will look very different to another person's 30-second solve. There's this aspect of performance coming through and personality coming through in the way they solve the cube.

So, you put all those things together, and it is uh by by 40 standards a sport. And it's a growing sport. This is stats from the World Governing Body of Speedcubing, showing the number of competitions and the number of countries going up year on year. This isn't just uh an American thing or Chinese thing. This is worldwide. And also the number of players going up. Last year, in-person competitions, over 40,000 players. And you can imagine there's probably people who count themselves as part of the hobby, as part of the pastime, who don't go to in-person competitions. That's includes me. So, maybe 10 maybe 10 times that number, maybe 15 times that number. We can say maybe top uh estimate, maybe there's a million speedcubers in the world, which is pretty impressive. So, that's the state of speedcubing today. So, how did we get there? And I'm going to break this down in terms of different uh puzzles that uh speedcubing had to solve as a community. And the first one is

organization. So, there were people all around the world through the '80s and the '90s who were interested in speed solving and were speed solving, but they were doing it in small local communities. And there was no global organization. And that changed and uh in the late '90s and the early 2000s, that changed. They started organizing on a global scale, and I mean, the short answer of how that happened is just the internet. But once that started, people started talking in IRC and on forums, then this notion of trying to run a kind of a world championship started growing and and trying to organize the sport as a sport, rather than just a hobby. And it happened for the first time in in 2003, uh they held the first of the modern Rubik's World Championship, speedcubing World Championships. And it was won by this man on the right, Dan Gosbee. And there were fair number of teething troubles to do with uh running this event. And there was a fair amount of backlash, which is probably, in hindsight, entirely overblown,

but still um Dan Gosbee took this criticism rather personally, and he left the scene immediately after organizing these event this event. And this is an interesting inflection point in the history of speedcubing because his style of World Championship is very different to the World Championship that we have today. It's very different to that average of five format that I've already shown you. He was much more interested in a much more confrontational televisual sport, where there were mind games and there was it was much more like wrestling where you could even though if you weren't the technically the best solver, you could still win cuz you could get inside someone else's head. And that's very different to what we have these days. So, it's interesting to think about what the sport would be like if he had stayed around. So, the next year, two people from two different from the different sides of the world came together uh and decided they needed some kind of umbrella organization to help regulate and uh regulate the sport and organize events. And that was uh Tyson Mao on the left, who was part of the the Californian speedcubing scene,

and Ron van Bruchem on the right, who was part of the Netherlands scene. And they formed the WCA, the World Cube Association, in 2003 in 2004, sorry. Uh and the next year, they held their first the first WCA World Championship, uh which is weirdly hard to find good photos of. So, you've got this really low-res rubbish stuff. And it was a success. People enjoyed it. It wasn't perfect. There were problems, but uh generally had a people had a good reaction to it, and then we were off to the races. Ever since, there was a World Championship every 2 years. So, what did what did WCA do that what did they bring to the table that helps improve the sport and the community? Uh and I think there was a couple of factors here. The first is uh this aspect of consistency. So, the average of five format that I've told you about is exactly the same at your local meetup, at your nationals, and at the World Championships. So, it's very easy for you to attend any one of those levels and then uh move up or down the scale. It's very accessible to you to do that. And it's

also very easy for the organizers because they've already run countless events of the exact same format. The only thing that changes is how many people are entering. They also have uh a very accessible format. So, uh last year, Ralph Koster et al. published some work on trust on uh trust spectrums, which they wanted to use to categorize MMO and online communities, but I think applies here as well. So, Ralph Koster would categorize this as uh speedcubing as a game with lots of parallel play, which means I can solve my Rubik's Cubes and you can solve your Rubik's Cubes, and we don't really impact on each other. There were no role what they called roles in this sport, which means I don't need to wait for someone to solve a 4x4 if I want to solve a 3x3. And there were independent resources. I can take as long or as slow as I want to solve my cubes, and you can take as long or as slow as you want, and we don't impact each other. And when you put all those together, they would categorize this sport as a low-trust game, which sounds

uh divisive, but it's not. What it means is it's very very accessible. It's very easy for someone to come along and join the sport, and it's very easy for people to start up their own uh their own events cuz they don't need some minimum bar of quality player or some minimum quantity of people in order for it to happen. And I think that's vital. When you have when you're starting with a puzzle that already has such a large learning curve, having a sport associated with it that actually has a really shallow learning curve helps balance that out. The WCA also has what they call the delegate system. And this means that any any event anywhere in the world can be an official WCA event and can have official world records and official national records set at it as long as it has a WCA delegate in attendance. And that is someone who's trained in the WCA regulations as well as how to run a WCA event. Now, here's the interesting thing is that any WCA delegate excuse me,

can train another WCA delegate. So, Ron van Bruchem, who you saw a few slides ago, used to fill his suitcase up with Rubik's Cubes, fly to some far-flung corner of the world where he knew there were some people interested in running events, train them as delegates, leave them with the cubes, and then within a year or two, that country was full of delegates trained to run events, and they were having like uh half a dozen events a year. So, it helps it spread um like almost like a virus. And then finally, it's a very non-confrontational sport. Uh as a as opposed to like Dan Gosbee's model of a more wrestling style sport. In fact, which which is actually to its detriment in terms of a spectator sport because if you're watching two people And in the World Championships, they have the top two cubers on the stage, and they'll solve in turns. So, one will do their first solve, the other one will do their first solve, the the first one will do their second solve, and so on. Um but it's actually really hard for you

as a spectator to work out who's in the lead right now because you have to do all that mental arithmetic of throwing away the best and the worst and doing an average and there's no strategic decision to make. Just make your next solve really fast. That's the only option. And that makes it very collegiate. It makes it very friendly because all you're focused on is doing well and solving fast. And if someone beats you in uh an event, it doesn't really matter as long as you're pushing your personal best forward. And so, everyone's really happy for everyone else as long as everyone's making progress uh and it makes it very a very friendly sport to be part of. So, now we've got organization. What we need now is innovation so we can have uh more um exciting, interesting things to do in a sport. And the one the major factor standing in the way of that at one point was the Rubik's Cube itself, the brand. Um the company behind it produced these

cubes that are very good toys, but they're not good speed cubes. They're slow, they're inconsistent, um they take ages to break in, uh they're very they're very awkward to use. And uh I I mentioned that the 2005 the WCA World Championships weren't perfect, and one of the things that wasn't perfect about it was that you had to use official brand freshly unboxed Rubik's Cubes as part of the competition. And this was both unfair because people were getting some people were getting cubes that were relatively easy to turn, and some were getting ones that were hard to turn, but also unfair because licensed Rubik's Cubes vary from country to country. People were coming from Japan, very used to a different color scheme color scheme layouts. And you can imagine that can make it very awkward to solve fast if white is no longer opposite yellow. And Tyson Mao now says this was a mistake. He says, "It's not the Nike 100 meters in the Olympics. It doesn't matter what trainers you're wearing. What matters is your time investment and your skill level and your talent." And so, from that point onwards, the WCA

have been very happy to take uh Rubik's brand sponsorship money, but you can use any cube you want in the competition. And so, people started popping up wanting to design better speed cubes for speed cubers, but they were still having trouble. If you remember at the beginning of the talk, I said there was a billion cubes in the world, including counterfeits, and Seven Towns, which is the company that owns the Rubik's Cube brand, still has this hangover of the eight from the '80s of being very very very protective of Rubik's Cube and of counterfeit Rubik's Cubes. And they'll use things like patents and trademarks to try and stop people uh selling what they think are counterfeit products. Unfortunately, speed cube designers often got caught in the crossfire of that. And so, there was a stage in the mid 2010s where it's like good speed cubes were being sold flat packed like this to try and avoid any implication that this was like an official Rubik's product. Uh that eased up in mid uh 2010s, uh and I'd love to do a whole talk about the patent like cases and

trademark cases and stuff, but I don't think that's a GDC talk that people be interested in. Uh but it eased up and now these days there's a tremendous variety of different speed cubes and innovative designs in the market on making faster speed cubes. Things like having springs inside your cube that can make it more forgiving of bad turns, having magnets which make it more stable. Having uh customization is the thing this last 12 months of being able to set up the cube exactly how you want it to make it your cube. But we're still not quite sustainable. So, we've got innovation, but we haven't got sustainability yet. And this is because, like we said, there's maybe a million speed cubes in the world, but you can only really sell them one piece of plastic. And these pieces of plastic aren't that expensive. So, to make it a sustainable business for the designers, what they need to do is sell you more plastic. And they can't sell you the Rubik's Cube because you already have a 3x3. So, what they're going to do is manufacture different types of cubes and sell you those things instead. And that

worked great. Like that worked out great for speed cubers because one thing they can they can always be pushing their times down and doing better and practicing more, but one thing they can never ever do is solve 3x3 for the first time again. And so, getting these new puzzles, these uh new experiences, is something they're very interested in and they're very happy to purchase these things. And so, collecting as part of the hobby started uh became a thing. And there's two main types of collecting. Uh the first one is collecting as novelty, the idea of trying to have that first 3x3 experience again. And you can have that either of either as maybe adding more layers or more dimensions to your puzzle. So, both of these kind of use 3x3 algorithms in a weird way. Or you can have something that's fundamentally different to the Rubik's Cube. This one on the left is called the Square-1 cuz it doesn't matter how many 3x3 algorithms you know, when you unbox it, you're back to square one.

Uh and there's also collection as aesthetic, the idea of collecting things that are interesting or rare or novel. Uh and you've got things here, these are called shape mods, which are these are both essentially Rubik's Cubes. Uh they're both 3x3s, except they've jumbled everything around. Where's my little laser pointer? So, this This is actually the corner piece on the Fisher Cube, and this is the edge piece. So, everything's slightly twisted. This is the Ghost Cube, which has every single piece is a unique shape, and so you're solving based on shape rather than position, but it's still a 3x3. And then there's things like this, which is the Oscar van de Venter um Sphere Gear, which is really interesting to look at, really interesting to turn, but trivially easy to solve. No one's buying that because they want the experience of solving the puzzle. They're buying it because they think it looks cool on their shelf. So, now we we've got uh all of pillars I think we need for a sustainable sport, but no one joins your sport because they've heard that you've got good

sustainable pillars. Uh and so, we need to get people in, and I think there's two reasons why people get interested in joining speed cubing. And the first one is definitely a novelty, a nostalgia factor. Because we talked about at the beginning how everyone got burnt out on the Rubik's Cube in '82 and they couldn't solve it, but they didn't throw them away. They put them on their bookshelves. And so, I can remember my parents' Rubik's Cube on their bookshelf. People younger than me can probably remember their grandparents' Rubik's Cube. And it They People like we don't have that burnout from the original fad. And so, for us picking up a Rubik's Cube is has got a huge dollop of nostalgia of of of the family home from when they were young. And I sent out some surveys to big uh like speed cubing um sites online to try and get some idea of how people got into speed cubing, and I got some some comments to back that up. But I think it's uh yeah, like a a really important part of the hobby itself, this nostalgia factor. And the

other factor I think is important is this virality that comes with it as well. So, this is a screenshot of a video of Colin Burns breaking the world record in 2015. And this is interesting because he was the first American to hold the world record for about a decade, which means this clip went sort of like viral on local news on the on the um and now here's some funny news at the end of the show. We got lots of uh lots of interest in speed cubing spiked after this cuz people saw this stuff on the news. But I think it's not just patriotism that got this onto the news. I think that helped. But also, I just think it's intrinsically interesting to watch someone solve a Rubik's Cube. It's a demonstration of their time investment and their skill level. And as humans, we just find that interesting to watch. And I've got comments to back that up as well. Uh I like that middle one. I think it's interesting that the YouTube algorithm has figured out that we as humans find it interesting to watch this.

But it's not just that it's interesting to watch, it's actually really rewarding as a cuber to teach someone else to cube. Because it's not like Smash Brothers where if I teach you to play Smash Brothers and eventually you beat me, I lose out. In speed cubing, if I teach you to speed cube and you surpass me, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to me cuz we've got that collegiate non-confrontational aspect to the sport. As long as I'm pushing my personal best forward, it's fine. Uh and in that aspect, I think it's like um very similar to video game speed running in the in the it's interesting to watch cuz this is investment, like you're watching someone else's time investment. I think it's uh people the speed running is very welcoming of new people to the sport. So, to wrap up, I think when you've got uh a nostalgic, satisfying yet complex toy with sustainable, innovative designers and businesses based on an accessible and welcoming competition all tied together with a

governing body that puts players before corporate interests, then you end up with a sport where before there was a dead toy. Uh and I'll leave you with this. In 2018, a rogue, big money, non-WCA world championship was announced. And when Red Bull is trying to muscle in on your sport, you must be doing something right. Thank you very much. Uh don't forget to fill out your forms. Uh high-five your CAs on the way out cuz they're awesome. Um and if anyone's got any questions, Hi. Uh Hello. Yeah. Um one fun question, what's your best time? Uh 26.4 seconds. Uh that's cool. Um congratulations. That was on the plane over here, by the way. Wow. Um the real question is uh I was a little bit confused cuz earlier you said that like um there's no for one reason for there for something to be considered as a sport is that you shouldn't have any advantage um

like based on your equipment or anything. But then you mentioned that like people are making their own stuff now like with magnets and other sort of stuff. Um and like in sports, it's important for there to be like, you know, whatever, like regulation size balls and stuff like that. So, like um I was a bit confused uh with that. So, like with the like um with the world competitions, like how do you kind of just kind of regulate like what kind of speed cubes can be used? Um So, the the position of the WCA at the moment is that as long like it doesn't matter. Like there's no there's no There hasn't yet been a technology that's deemed unfair. It's not like the swimsuits in the Olympics a couple of years ago. There's nothing that's been deemed terribly unfair. It's just about making the cubes more reliable, easier to use, more satisfying to use. Uh interestingly, Erno Rubik himself, the inventor of the Rubik's Cube, takes the opposite position. He thinks all cubes should be standardized and it should just be about skill. Um but yeah, at the moment we haven't reached the point where um anyone's taken offense at any particular

design. Maybe that will come. Hi. I'm interested in the the organization, the WCA sort of history, and um uh you know, as a community of game developers here, I think a lot of people are making games and hoping that they may take on sort of like a community and like a competitive scene of their own. How important do you think it was that that organization, you know, wasn't run by Rubik's or, you know, was that sort of grassroots part of it an essential component or I think so in this case. I think so because that um that original Rubik's Cube was just so inherently bad as a speed cube, and still is bad as a speed cube. In fact, I have a bunch down here if people want to come and play with them. In fact, I have a brand Rubik's Cube, and you could compare it to my my um good speed cube and see like what you think the differences are. Um But yeah, so that it's it's the it's the the tension between making it accessible to people just exploring the puzzle, to children who just playing with the

puzzle, which is what the Rubik's brand wants to be, and then also making it really fast, which makes it unstable and makes it hard to use. Uh and that's improved a little bit with magnets recently, but still they're very like loose feeling cubes compared to the the Rubik's Cube. So like for this, yes. For this particular domain, yes. And I think probably um you can see it in speed running as well. In speed cube speed running, they don't look at the original intention of the game designers. It's just about how do I get to this end as fast as possible. I'm going to glitch my through it way through it. I'm going to break my way through it. So it it's giving I think it's really important to give the players the control of what they're doing and let them try and find their best way of doing it. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Thank you. Um so I can totally understand why making making the sport non-confrontational is a good thing. But I'm curious to know what confrontational Rubik's Cubing

looks like. Like what How do you make Rubik's Cube confrontational? So the Red Bull World Championships actually does that. The Red Bull World Championships is a face-off between two people. And there's various different events they have. It's not just solving We call it racing, where you both try and solve a Rubik's Cube, and the first one to solve wins a point. Um there are various other events as well, but it's yeah, it's it's um face-to-face, like getting up in each other's grill, and uh having like making it so when you do something good, someone else loses out. And I think that's really important for spectating. It makes it a much better spectator sport. And I think they'll reach a point where speed Cubing reaches a ceiling, and they need to start looking at making the top-level sport more interesting to spectators. Uh but we haven't reached that yet because it's not it's not grown big enough yet. I think there's probably 10x more growth left in the in the sport. So yeah. Thank you. Uh I'm just curious in competition, does

each competitor have the same randomization of their cube? And how do you know if that if that's not true, then like how do you know somebody didn't just kind of get a simpler solve? So the uh they Everyone gets So every like it's it's it's a bit technical, but so every hour there's a whole there's a there's a set list of random scrambles that are generated. So it's um they're guaranteed to be good random scrambles. And then those are applied by the people called the scramblers that bring you that that scramble the cubes for you. Um So and that changes every hour. So the idea is you can't get a scramble and then go and tell your mates, and then they are prepared for what the scramble will be. Uh So you What was the question again? You're asking about scrambles, isn't it? I I get I guess I was drawing a parallel in my mind to duplicate bridge, where you do play a series of different hands, but each partner is kind of playing a hand which every other team has played. And so in some sense, like

it's a fair version of bridge, because everybody is given the same resources to be able to play. Oh yeah, yeah, like the the average of five thing is designed to help with that, cuz you do get very um very beneficial scrambles sometimes. There's a thing called a PLL skip, which is like gold dust in Cubing. When you if you get a PLL skip, which is like skipping a whole step, like one of the most expensive steps of solving the cube, and it just randomly happens to like come out solved, and you don't have to do it. Uh getting PLL skip is a a really key part of getting a good fast time. And so they take that five and throw away the best time and the worst time in order to try and get around like accidentally giving people like some people a PLL skip scramble, and some people don't get a PLL skip scramble. Got you. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. Come to the front and play with the cubes if you want to play with the cubes, but have a good rest of your Monday.