Optimizing solutions: n-slice insertions

tl;dr

You can insert 3 slices in one of the following ways:

Where (I) denotes a “neutral” sequence like R2 R2 or R2 F2 L2 and (D) denotes a “diagonal swap” sequence like R2 F2 R2. The list above is complete up to inverses and mirrors.

Setting

The problem is this: say you have a DR finish on U/D that contains some “sliceable” sequences, such as U D', U2 D, U D or similar. To be more precise, a sliceable sequence is a sequence of moves that would cancel out on a 2x3x3 cube.

(I will not address the problem of having a DR finish minus slice and inserting E-moves to solve the slice, because it can be reduced to the “solved slice” case by solving the slice sub-optimally with any insertion.)

Sliceable sequences can often be simplified also in a 3x3x3 cube. One way to do this is to insert E-layer moves at different points of the solution in such a way that the effect on the E-layer cancels out. It has been known since the early days of DR (2019) how to insert two moves that cancel out (E and E', or E2 and E2) without affecting the E-layer edges even without looking at a cube. (I believe the first person to come up with a way to do this was Wen, but correct me if I am wrong.)

I will call insertions of multiple E-layer moves n-slice insertions. I will start this post with some necessary preliminaries, and then I’ll recall how to find 2-slice insertions without looking at the cube. Then I will move explain how to do 3-slice insertions in a similar way, and I will prove that there is no other way to do 3-slice insertions. Finally, I’ll leave here some considerations I have made for more complex cases, hoping that this will help us develop a general theory to perform any kind of n-slice insertion quickly and without looking at a cube.

Preliminaries: floppy and “minidisc” sequences

To insert slices, we have to understand how sequences of DR moves affect the edges of the E-layer. For this purpose, we can ignore any U* or D* move, hence we have to study move sequences in the floppy cube subgroup .

There are two kinds of sequences that are particularly important: those that, up to y rotations, do not affect the E-layer (we’ll call these sequences I-sequences, where I stands for “Identity”) and those that, up to y rotations, perform a single diagonal swaps (D-sequences).

Some examples of I-sequences:

Some examples of D-sequences:

Considering only the effect of a floppy sequence on the E-layer edges up to y rotations, there are only 6 possible types of sequences. They are equivalent to the possible permutations of a 2x2x1 cube (or “minidisc” cube, name that I have just made up) that keep one corner (say BL) fixed:

This fact will come into play later on.

2-slice insertions

As I said at the beginning, it has been known for a while how to do 2-slice insertions (E E' or E2 E2) without affecting the E-layer edges. The trick is the following:

There is no other way of inserting two slices so that they cancel out.

Examples

For our first example, say you have a DR finish like this:

Setup: R2 D R2 D' U' R2 U R2 U' B2 L2

Solution:
L2 B2 U //Blocks + OBL
R2 U' R2 U D R2 D' R2 //J+J perm

Ideally, you would like to “slice away” the U D in the second step. You can insert there either an E or an E', in either case one you save one move. Where can you insert the second slice move? We can see that the three moves before U D are an I-sequence, and placing an E' before them would cancel out the U ending the first step. Here only an E' can be inserted, so we’ll have to use E in the other spot. So we have:

L2 B2 U [2]
R2 U' R2 U D [1] R2 D' R2
[1] = E
[2] = E'

Giving a final solution: L2 B2 D B2 U' B2 U2 R2 D' R2. One move saved!

(I like to number my insertions in the order I found them, hence the [2] before the [1] in this case.)

For our second example, take the double edge swap (UF DF) (UL DR):

R2 F2 R2 U2 F2 R2 F2 U2

You can turn the two U2 moves into Uw2 and you get an equivalent alg. This is equivalent to the following two-slice insertion:

R2 F2 R2 U2 [1] F2 R2 F2 [2] U2
[1] = [2] = E2

Notice that the two slices are separated by a D-sequence.

Less intuitively, you can also change some of the other moves to their wide counterpart:

R2 [1] F2 R2 U2 F2 [2] R2 F2 U2
[1] = [2] = M2

or

R2 F2 [1] R2 U2 F2 R2 [2] F2 U2
[1] = [2] = S2

This trick is useful for maximizing cancellations with edge insertions, without memorizing many variations of the same alg.

Bonus: 2 slices to solve a 4x case

This bit is out of scope for this page, but it is still interesting to note. If, instead of shortening a “solved slice”, you are trying to solve a 4x case (that is, edges are solved but the 4 E-layer centers are swapped), you can still use 2-slice insertions fairly easily. In fact, inserting E E or E' E' so that they are separated by a D-sequence is going solves this case. Keep in mind that this will not work if the two E moves in the same direction are separated by an I-sequence!

3-slice insertions

Up to inverses and mirrors, there are only two possible types of 3-slice insertions: E E E2 and E E2 E. Both consist of two E moves (or two E' moves) and one E2 move.

To understand how to find spots to insert them, we are going to think about them as if we are inserting two E moves in the same direction, and then fixing the slice by inserting an E2. This works for both types of 3-slice insertions.

The first question we want to ask is then: where can we insert two E moves so that the result can be fixed by a single E2 insertion? An E2 insertion necessarily performs a double swap of edges, so our two E insertion must leave such a case. (We are ignoring centers, because we already now they will be solved at the end of our process if we insert two E moves in the same direction and one E2 move.)

The answer is: the moves between the two E moves must form an I-sequence. Indeed, since an I-sequence does not affect the relative position of E-layer edges, two E moves separated by an I-sequence have the same effect as an E2 move, that is a double edge swap (up to y rotations).

This already tells us something useful: in those cases where we would like to insert two slices E E', but we find an admissible spot for the second slice that would cancel more if we inserted the inverse move, we can the inverse move and hope to find a suitable spot to “correct” the insertions with an E2. We’ll see in a minute where we can insert the E2, now let’s prove that this is the only way to perform 3-slice insertions.

We can check that this is the only admissible way to insert the two E moves by going through all other “minidisc sequences” listed in the previous section, and checking that E (minidisc sequence) E does not yield, up to a y rotation, a double edge swap.

Up to a y rotation:

So, where can we insert the final E2? This is easy: the moves between the E2 and any of the two E moves must be either an I-sequence or a D-sequence. This can be proved with the same reasoning we used a few paragraphs above when we said that two E moves separated by an I-sequence have the same effect as an E2, combined with the knowledge on 2-slice insertions of type E2 E2.

This gives us 4 possible “patterns” for 3-slice insertions, up to inverses and mirrors:

Where (I) and (D) denote I- and D-sequences, respectively.

Examples

Let’s take this example:

Setup: L2 F2 L2 D' L2 D R2 D B2 U'
Solution:
U B2 U' B2 D' F2 U //HTR
U D' B2 L2 B2 U' D // Finish, one move cancel

(The second step could be replace by U' D F2 R2 F2 U D' for one less move, and then you could use a 2-slice insertion, but please let me use this artificial example for now.)

The DR finish is then: U B2 U' B2 D' F2 U2 D' B2 L2 B2 U' D

We would like to slice away the U2 D' and the U' D at the end, but they are separated by a D-sequence, and an E2 E2 insertion would not work here. But fear not, for we can use 3-slice insertions:

U B2 U' [3] B2 D' F2 U2 D' [2] B2 L2 B2 [1] U' D
[1] = E
[2] = E2
[3] = E

In this case rather than inserting the two E moves first and then adjust with an E2 it makes more sense to insert and E and an E2 and then fix with another E, for maximum cancellation. This is reflected in the order I wrote the insertions.

Here is an example of 3-slice insertion in a real (at-home) solve of mine:

Scramble: R' U' F D2 F' D2 F2 R2 F U2 F2 D2 F2 R2 L U2 B2 U' L R' F2 D' B U2 R' U' F
Solution: F' L' R D' B U L' F2 L' R2 D' L2 D2 B2 D2 R' D2 B2 R2 B2 L F2 R (23)

F' L' R D' B //EO (5/5)
U L' F2 L' R2 D' //DR (6/11)
(R' F2 R' *) R2 U2 F2 U2 L' //HTR (8/19)
B2 U2 R2 U2 //Slice (4/23)

The slice is not solve here, so the first thing I do is solving it (very inefficiently).

* = R' D2 L R' B2 L' //Placeholder solve slice (6-2/27)

Then I rewrite DR part and work on insertions:

R2 [1] U2 F2 U2 L' [2] B2 U2 R2 U2 L B2 R L' [3] D2 F2 R
[1] = M2 (0)
[2] = [3] = M' (-4)

In this case, each pair of insertions is separated by an I-sequence.

General n-slice insertions

I have not been able to devise a general method for n-slice insertions, but I have some ideas on how to work in this direction. This section contains only speculations, if you are only interested in learning new techniques that you can apply to your solves you do not have to read it.

First of all, it could be worth considering only what we can call fundamental slice sequences, i.e. those having no contiguous sub-sequence that keeps centers solved. For example E E E2 is fundamental, but E2 E' E E2 is not (the E' E subsequence keeps centers solved) and neither is E E' E E2 E (both the E E' at the beginning and the E' E starting on move 2, as well as the ending E E2 E, are sub-sequences that do not affect centers).

The idea behind this is that we can perform a non-fundamental slice insertion in two or more passes, by inserting the shorter subsequences first. Unfortunately, this is not as simple: for example, the non-fundamental sequence E E' E E' could be such that the first E E' pair leaves a 3-cycle that is subsequently fixed by the other E E' pair. Nevertheless, decomposing a sequence into fundamental subsequences can have its use.

Classifying all fundamental sequences is actually very easy: up to inverses and mirrors, this is the full list:

The fact that there are no fundamental sequences longer than 4 moves is a consequence of the following theorem (warning: Math ahead, caution advised):

Theorem. Let n and k be positive integers. If a sequence of k elements of Z/nZ has sum 0 and it has no non-trivial (contiguous) subsequence with sum 0, then k <= n.

Clarification: non-trivial means that it contains at least one element and it is not the whole sequence.

Proof (thanks to Chiara for the nice proof). It is enough to prove that any sequence of n+1 elements of Z/nZ has a subsequence whose sum is 0. To prove this, let, for l=1 to n+1, s_l = a_1 + … + a_l. If s_i=0 for any i, we are done. Otherwise by the pigeonhole principle there must be s_i and s_j with s_i = s_j and, say, i < j. But then the subsequence a_(i+1), …, a_j has sum s_j - s_i = 0. This proves the claim.

More work needs to be done here.