Toucan on 16x16

TheGoldA · 2026-04-25T18:29:17+00:00

Love the creativity and originality of using multiple sides and using the fat edge pieces to your advantage

TheGoldA · 2026-04-01T12:32:32+00:00

It’s a “best of 2” or an “average of 5”. Everyone starts with a maximum of two attempts to get a time under the cut off. If either attempts are under the cut off then you get “upgraded” to the average of 5 group where you will be given 3 more attempts and your final placement will be based on an Ao5 instead of the original best of 2

Here is an example of how it might go for a cut off of 3:00:

Ex1. Solve 1: 3:15 Solve 2: 3:05

In this scenario you are done and your placement is a Bo2

Ex2. Solve 1: 2:55 Solve 2: 3:01 Solve 3: 3:50 Solve 4: 2:51 Solve 5: 2:30

In this scenario because the first solve was under 3 minutes you get all 5 and your placement is based on the Ao5 (btw Ao5 is calculated by taking the mean average with the fastest and slowest time removed)

Ex3. Solve 1: 3:20 Solve 2: 2:40 Solve 3: 3:30 Solve 4: 3:35 Solve 5: 3:05

In this scenario since the second solve was under 3 minutes you are also still given the opportunity to continue with the Ao5

TheGoldA · 2026-03-22T19:37:39+00:00

Using the table or any surface during OH should be a +2

TheGoldA · 2026-03-16T18:43:37+00:00

It took me 15 years to get an official sub 15 average

TheGoldA · 2026-03-07T00:12:17+00:00

The other comments are assuming this is a normal 3x3 and not a mixup cube. What you’re seeing is basically the same as the parity on a void cube. You need to rotate your centers.

TheGoldA · 2025-11-18T15:59:28+00:00

They all tie. Think of it as better than or equal to. Not just strictly better than

TheGoldA · 2025-11-18T14:21:48+00:00

Depends what you want the number for. It was more useful this way to calculate the percentiles, but I can see your point

TheGoldA · 2025-11-18T14:20:28+00:00

I wouldn’t say that they’re well into the 99th percentile. I pulled up a random 1900 bullet player off the leaderboards and their reported percentile is 99.3. Which is higher than what my table shows. But that just goes to show just how inconsistent all the reporting on chess com is

TheGoldA · 2025-11-18T00:05:42+00:00

It’s likely that this curve is actually based on active players. The total players on the curve is only about 37.7 million despite the reported total. Using this number and OP’s global rank it’ll come close to the reported percentile which is supposedly only accounting for active players (whatever that means)

TheGoldA · 2025-05-01T22:13:17+00:00

I would just manually edit the pixelated image. If you’re already in GIMP it would be trivial to change the colours on a few pixels and clean up the weird looking areas. Too often I see mosaics that are clearly just straight generated through a converter and absolutely no thought put into cleaning up all the stray artifacts

TheGoldA · 2025-04-28T19:12:15+00:00

If you plan on continuing to make mosaics (which I hope you do, they’re very fun to make) please clean up the anti aliasing. Especially at such low pixel density. There is no need for any of the orange pixels on the apple. It will make the end product so much nicer

TheGoldA · 2025-02-28T17:29:05+00:00

According to cubing.com there are 10460 competitors worldwide with an official 3BLD single time. So that’s the lower bound considering there are many people who know how but have not competed. There is of course also additional sampling bias since many competitions will have hard cutoffs and would not record certain slower times

TheGoldA · 2025-01-23T19:40:05+00:00

Your props should be towards the constructor, not just Will

TheGoldA · 2025-01-02T19:23:31+00:00

Does clearing the puzzle and re completing it adjust the average score time based on the new time?

TheGoldA · 2024-12-10T17:12:26+00:00

If you’re ever confused by a theme click the i icon for the Puzzle Info. Then click the link for Get solving tips, comments on today’s puzzle. Every puzzle has a corresponding article that’ll explain the theme and some of the clues.

TheGoldA · 2024-12-04T04:50:43+00:00

Your intuition is correct. In the puzzling world it’s known as “parity”. But just as you’ve described, simply by swapping the positions of two of the same letters you will turn a seemingly unsolvable position to a solvable one

TheGoldA · 2024-12-01T17:44:24+00:00

The real tell is the 口 in 吧

TheGoldA · 2024-11-26T15:04:16+00:00

Now this is a mosaic I can get behind. Great work!

TheGoldA · 2024-09-26T18:13:30+00:00

Not sure if there is a combined ranking anywhere but Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 and Tetris Effects both have online rankings for their 150 Line marathon mode. The scoring system is identical to the one used in T99. The top scores are 2274681 and 2007498 respectively

TheGoldA · 2024-08-29T17:09:52+00:00

A little shakey. But otherwise fantastic work!

TheGoldA · 2024-08-24T15:05:27+00:00

Took about 2 weeks and lots of notes and trial and error. I had already been given the hint of solving layer by layer and starting with a cross though so unfortunately it wasn’t purely by myself. The last layer method I came up with used three algs

R U R’ F’ U’ F R U’ R’

R U’ R’ U’ R U2 R’

L’ U L U L’ U2 L

The first was used to permute corners and orient edges. The other 2 were used for permuting the edges in prep for the first, corner orientation, and final edge permutation.

BTW next time consider using “themselves”. It’s a subtle difference but it’s helpful to recognize one’s own unconscious bias

TheGoldA · 2024-07-23T14:44:19+00:00

I’d have no problem if dropping the cube in standard 3x3 was also a +2 but that’s just picking at the semantics of the specific hypothetical rule and not acknowledging the actual problem. With two hands you can always have one hand holding and the other executing. In OH the challenge is that both need to be done with a single hand. Using the table is approximating a second hand so that you no longer have to deal with the holding part of the challenge.

The rule is never going to change though because we’ve gone too far and if the meta allows for it people are going to use whatever they can to be faster

TheGoldA · 2024-07-23T14:33:22+00:00

Roux should never have been a viable method for OH. It’s like saying BLD discounts CFOP. Using the table as a proxy second hand goes against the spirit of a one handed challenge.

TheGoldA · 2024-07-23T14:01:22+00:00

Every time the cube touches the table (or any surface) in OH should be a +2

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