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Proposal: Puzzling

Speedcubing is the act of solving Rubik's cubes and other closely related puzzles quickly. It's sort of a half-sport, half-puzzle activity. There's already a Sports site, but so far they don't have anything about speedcubing. As a note, speedcubing is a pretty popular activity, and the World Cube Association which governs it has tens of thousands of members.

In principle, it seems to match this proposal quite well, but in practice the concerns of speedcubers are almost totally different from those of ordinary puzzle fans. These would include things like what sorts of lubricants to use, how best to modify a cube to make particular sequences of turns faster, whether certain modifications are competition-legal, etc. I do not imagine these could be answered by anyone other than another speedcuber.

This leads me to the question: is speedcubing on topic here? I mean to include both theoretical and practical questions that a speedcuber might have. There are already many online sites dedicated to speedcubing and a pretty large community, so if this proposal would be willing to accept those sorts of questions (and presumably have a tag for speedcubing) that would be the best outcome. If not I will consider making my own proposal for this topic.

I've added 5 such questions that might be interesting to speedcubers:

The voting on such questions is presumably the best way to determine whether such topics are within the scope of this proposal, but I'd also appreciate the opinions of others here in answers as to what sorts of speedcubing questions should be allowed.

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Speedcubing Yes! Surely the time dimension is a perfectly valid aspect of solving any puzzle.

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  • Cubing has a much wider range than just solving it. People want to know which cubes are good, which methods are the most efficient, and which variations of algorithms are fastest and how to do the fingertricks
    – mathmaniac88
    Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 5:05
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I'd say solution (acquisition) optimisation has inherent characteristics of solving puzzles, even when not applied to puzzles. Probably this is too general for this site, but the question is specifically about a popular puzzle, so I see even less of a problem.

Questions about puzzle rules, whether competitive or not, are a nice fit too, since some traditional types of puzzles rely on ambiguous wording (-gry anyone?).

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Yes, for another reason than the ones already stated: speedcubing as a topic is far too narrow to have a SE site of its own. A Rubik's cube is a puzzle, therefore these questions are on-topic here.

Sure, there may be questions about lubricants, for example, but this is no different than, say, a question about electrical circuits and wiring on Home Improvement Stack Exchange.

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while I agree that optimisation is on topic for the group, I am non that sure that speedcubing as such should be. Most other techniques used in it are not related to puzzles as such.

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