Learning from ourselves

There's a lot we can learn from watching ourselves, how we learn, how we practice the things we love. A truckload of members of our community did just that, through a LONG survey, capturing many aspects of a cuber's life, from personal times and training practices, to our online and offline cubing habits, through our puzzle collections and hardware preferences. What follows is a sneak peak into a much larger amount of data we collected and analysed on how and why we cube.

Acknowledgements

This project is the brainchild of the r/Cubers subreddit mods, who for the past several years have been running a big cubing megasurvey, CubeRoot (Ruimin Yan) who bemoaned the dearth of exchange between the East and West cubing communities, and Basilio, who gets restive when he doesn't have any data to play with.

The TLDR

This article is already a TLDR to the 70-pages deck that presents the entire data but if our attention span demands an even shorter summary, we probably shouldn't be reading this anyway. Nevertheless here we go:

The world is very rich in diversity and peculiarities, and yet the way we cube is strikingly similar across places, ages and interests.

Find here the full analysis (english, chinese)

Our data

The data comes from the responses of ~1500 cubers across the Reddit and BiliBili/WeChat cubing communities. All combined, we spent several hundreds of hours responding to the 160+ question long survey. The result is a wealth of information and data on our collective experience in cubing.

How fast are we?

On average, we can usually solve the cube in under 18 seconds, with, as we might expect, quite a bit of variability: one quarter of us need more than 25 seconds, one quarter less than 14. Our speed depends mostly on how long we have been cubing, which on average is 1 to 1.5 years. Our objective is, most often, Sub10, even though only ~5% of us actually manage to reach that. In general we strive to get to times that are 44% of our current average.

What do we practice?

Very few of us stick to a single event, 3/4 practice at least 2, and on average we practice solving at least 3 different puzzles. Almost all of us do 3x3, and then we either go up or down, with 2x2 and 4x4 being the second and third most practiced events respectively. Being good at one puzzle usually translate into being good at others, with the most successful combinations being smaller puzzles (2x2&skewb&pyraminx) or larger ones (4x4&5x5).

How did we learn?

We mostly learned by watching youtube videos, but we usually got interested by seeing someone else solve. The vast majority of us have introduced someone to cubing, so it is a passion that tends to spread. We usually learn more than one method for solving 3x3, with CFOP and Roux being the most frequent ones. But in the end, barring some rare cases, we stick to CFOP. Many of us go further than just learning the method though: we learn different algsets, we become color neutral, and more than half of us try to come up with our own algorithms.

My Precious...

We have a tendency to hoard puzzles, with most of us possessing 10 puzzles or more, sometimes hundreds. Some of us still have a soft spot for the originals, while others prefer last years' puzzle. We like our hardware magnetic, and with adjustable settings, and some of us like to modify or print our cubes, to turn them into more challenging or different puzzles. We've decided that stickerless is the way to go, but for internals the question is not as clear cut yet.

But... why...?

At the end of the day, cubing is a very social activity. While many of us cube at home, most of us have friends with whom we share this passion, be it IRL or otherwise. We come to our online community to discuss the nuts and bolts of cubing methods, hardware and theory, to learn tips and tricks from each other, or just to mess around and have some fun. Some of us are more competitive, some of us just like to collect puzzles, and many are in between: we all find something in this hobby of ours, and we are not alone in doing it.

That seems like a pretty good thing to have!

And in case you missed the link up there : (english, chinese)
Link to the cleaned data : (excel file) Note: if you've worked with data you'll know how not exactly always up to snuff it is. Not exactly all the data is there, some of it could not easily be combined between the reddit and chinese datasets, some of it was bogus "I'm too bored to keep filling this in",  some was added after the fact (15 participants from reddit were added after the fact and didnt make it into this) and some of it was lost in translation from chinese. So take this as the best effort we could do in the circumstances, and that 1-2% of missing, quirky or unusable data will have to be sacrificed to the altar of reasonable effort.
Link to the reddit post: (here)
Link to the wechat post: (here)

Basilio Noris is an expert in machine learning with a passion for cubing, data visualization and astrophotography. He did his academic research on the early diagnosis of Autism, bridging psychology, neurology and data science. He's been running for the past ten years a company doing analysis of human behavior in retail and manufacturing environments.