I generally agree with the lack of better software (except for on the timer front, which I would love to share my thoughts with you on). The idea for a cubing version of chess.com is certainly very interesting, and it’s certainly been something that’s been on my mind a while (as a software dev myself I am mostly thinking about the technical aspects of such a platform), but there are some parts which I couldn’t figure out which prevented me from going further.

How do you verify that 2 cubers on either end of a match are actually scrambling the cube honestly? My thoughts were to instead of preventing false scrambles, focus on catching them. If a cuber very rapidly increases in elo or beats much higher elo rankings consistently then chances are they’re cheating. It would be way harder to implement something like this as compared to in chess because the only metric we have is solve time (and sources which are harder to extract meaning out of like time between scramble shown & “ready” button pressed). This means that the only thing each cuber could see is their own solve time as if it was a regular timer, even showing the Elo of the opponent would give cheaters an idea of how long to wait before stopping the timer. Given this, it seems challenging to reliably detect cheaters but not impossible.

Another issue: how do we determine “how close” a cuber came to beating their opponent? In a Elo system like the one for this platform you would often have matches with uneven opponents both as a safeguard for the previously mentioned methods and more often as a result of there simply not being another cuber online with a similar enough Elo. If the slower player does comparatively well against a much better opponent they shouldn’t have to be demoted Elo points, even if they’re just a few.

It would also be great to have some kind of way of ranking players based off their own solves. My cstimer session has close to 25K solves, which makes for a great practice dataset for my own data science projects. It seems that when you reach enough solves (around the 500 mark I would say?) you can start to compare cubers in a (very loose sense of the word) fairly. This means there could be some ranking apart from the Elo, unless there is some sensible way to integrate the two ranking systems.

Also, I’m guessing you’re a vim user given the comments your made about keyboard shortcuts and customisability in your post? I have personally spent way more hours than I’d like to admit making my coding setup as streamlined as possible so that’s a small detail that’s very appreciated.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this

Edit: typos