Message #1162

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: 4D speedsolving contest results
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2010 18:10:34 -0700

After several glitches and tests and software wrangling and one false
start, we managed to pull off the first ever hyperspeedsolving contest
this morning (for those of us on US west coast time).
And without further adieu, the winner is…….. (insert fanfare here)
Mateusz Burnicki, with a round-trip time of 15 minutes, 57 seconds! A
very respectable time for the 3^4 with prepared macros allowed. Hurray
for Mateusz! Your prize t-shirt will be on it’s way shortly.

Here is Mateusz’s winning log file
<http://superliminal.com/cube/contest/winner.log>. He was followed very
closely by Matthew Sheerin, Andrey Astrelin, and Remiguisz Durka in that
order, each a minute or so apart, and finally our young Raymond Zhao
(AKA deustfrr) who was unhappy about coming in last even though he
easily broke his 30 minute goal. So congratulations to all the brave
competitors. I was extremely impressed with every one of you, and not
just by your stellar performances but especially by your collective
sense of humor and fair play.
Here is the chat log
<http://superliminal.com/cube/contest/contest_chat.txt> for anyone who
wants to reconstruct the excitement.

Poor deustfrr was so excited that if he hadn’t been so young I would
have been worried that he might have a heart attack when I had to call a
false start! <http://superliminal.com/cube/contest/winner.log> My
girlfriend Mikayla on hearing my updates throughout the event told me to
tell him that she is now officially his fangirl. How sweet is that!

Once the excitement of the main event was over, Remi spontaneously
suggested a 2nd round just for fun, and most of the contestants decided
to join in. I suppose they just needed to burn off excess energy
generated by the main event, or maybe they wanted to prepare for the
next contest. Everyone agreed that it would be great to make it a
regular event. I’m generally happy to run these but I was a little
surprised that they all wanted to make it a monthly thing. Maybe we
could arrange for just a season of monthly events leading up to final
competition between the best performers for a cash prize? I could
probably handle that. I’ll even keep upping the prize in proportion to
the number of contestants that finish in the allowed time. We can do
whatever the community wants, so please send your suggestions to this
list. I especially encourage the contestants to send in their personal
descriptions of the event along with suggestions for future fun.

We’ve been hoping to hold this contest for years but now we finally have
enough people ready to jump in, so I’m completely happy. Thanks and
congratulations to everyone involved!

Happy cubing,
-Melinda