Rubik's Cubes
The goal of speed solving is to solve the Rubik's Cube (and similar puzzles) as fast as possible. Most speed solvers are able to do this in under 20 seconds. There is an organisation called the World Cube Association (WCA) which organises competitions in which speed solvers can compete and get official times that are posted on leader boards. I am a speed solver myself, and I have also been to a couple of competitions organised by the WCA.
The WCA has a website where they show competitions (both upcoming and past ones) as well as leaderboards for the various events that are speed solved at competitions. The data for the leaderboards is also freely able to be downloaded from their website: https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/results/misc/export.html.
Competitveness
Official competitions have been going on since 2003. In that time both methods and hardware have improved a lot which has contributed to a significant drop in times. The graph below represents the times needed to advance past the first round of 3x3x3 at competitions held in the UK from 2009 to 2020. As you can see the required times have remained fairly stable since 2016.
Gender
All competitors are required to tell the WCA their gender when they register; this information is also accessible from the WCA database. I wanted to look into whether there is a statistically significant difference between the male and female competitors. If so, then why is there a difference.
Relay Leader board
I wanted to do some of feature engineering to the WCA database. I decided that create a leader board for the fastest total time to solve all the NxNxN puzzles that are speed solved in competitions. 'Relays' aren't an official event but theoretical times can be easily obtained by summing up competitors official times in these events.
​
I also decided to create a score that measured relatively good the times are. I calculated this score by normalising all the times then plugging them into a weighted sigmoid function which outputted a score from 0 to 100.
Here are the current top 10 times.
