Learning from ourselves, Again!

You did it again : you opened up your devices of preference from everywhere in the world, filled in a VERY LONG survey, and allowed us to analyse many, many facets of our cubing habits, skillsets, preferences and hoarding syndromes, which we've put together and set onto digital pages for you to see. Here's a couple of highlights, and HERE's the 90+ pages of complete analysis 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 this megasurvey. Special thanks to the speedsolving.com mods for spreading the word and the link to the survey and having their bit of the community  participate, and to Shawn Boucke ("SpeedCubeReview") for going through the analysis with a fine-toothed comb, checking and correcting things, providing his insights and asking questions that helped improve the document so much! And finally thanks to Ming Dao Ting ("Tingman") for aiming his laser eyes on this and summarising in his own way something that would normally take a long time to digest!

The TLDR

This article is already a TLDR to the 92-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:

We cubers all have the same passion, but come from so many different places, times and ways of living. The way we learned, the things we practice and the way we care about it paints a picture of a passion that has far more color and variety than a plastic cube with 6 hues would suggests at first.

Find here the full analysis (PDF)

Our data

The data comes from the responses of ~1400 cubers across the english-speaking online cubing communities. All combined, we spent several hundreds of hours responding to the 160+ question long survey.

How fast are we?

On average, we can usually solve the cube in under 17 seconds, with, as we might expect, quite a bit of variability: one quarter of us need more than 30 seconds, one quarter less than 14. Our speed depends mostly on how long we have been cubing, which on average is 2.5 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 68% of our current average.

What do we practice?

Very few of us stick to a single event, more than half of us practice at least 3. Almost all of us do 3x3, and then we either go up or down, with 2x2 and 4x4 being tied for second place for most practiced events besides 3x3. Being good at one puzzle usually translate into being good at others, with the most successful combinations big cubes (4x4 through 6x6) and One-Handed 3x3.

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 20 puzzles, 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, and we DEFINITELY prefer other surfaces than frosted plastic.

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 : (PDF)
Link to the cleaned data : (LINK) 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 was bogus "I'm too bored to keep filling this in", some of it was too obscure to understand (especially in the times and PBs section). 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: (LINK)

The author of this analysis and the linked document is Basilio Noris, 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.