I have solved many Rubik's cubes in my life. I have also had a good amount of alcohol in my life. Of course I have done the occasional solve while intoxicated, but I have always wondered how exactly the amount of alcohol in my system would impact my timed solves.

The experiment was simple. 160 solves with a shot of 90 proof liquor at each interval of 20. Starting with a control group before anything took effect and ending with an extra 20 solves, not wanting to drink anymore, were the only variations in my alcohol consumption. All data was tracked by csTimer and put into Excel in order to make a nice graph the day after.

The results were pretty straightforward. Times, as expected, worsened and varied more as more alcohol entered my bloodstream. Below are a few stats from the session. For reference, I average about 12.5.

Best Time: 10.29 (Solve 72)

Best Ao5: 11.52 (Solves 37-41)

Best Ao12: 12.30 (Solves 27-38)

Worst Time: 23.91 (Solve 107)

Worst Ao5: 17.36 (Solves 140-144)

Worst Ao12: 15.36 (Solves 138-149)

Feel free to ask any questions. This was fun! Would not do it again.

Now this is worthy work. I would love to see you expand this to golf, and lawn darts.

I feel like these times are not significantly different from each other (statistically speaking). I would love to see the control limits from the before and during (or even before vs end) to see if my visual intuition is correct.

It makes kind of sense that they're not different, solving a rubiks cube is done following a set of different move algorithms that after enough practice become muscle memory, so alcohol will only impair this very little, same way you can type almost as well sober as with a bit of alcohol, muscle memory will only fail you once you start to get pretty wasted

I'm reminded of Johnny Fever's alcohol reflex test when he was on-air at WKRP in Cincinnati.

Not individually, but I think the trend should be. There's enough points that it seems significant to me even though the it's only a slight increase.

So, what you’re saying is there’s a sweet spot at being drunk where you can go with your day by day routine with no issues

This gives *some* evidence for the Ballmer Peak (but not a lot).

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Not including zero on Y axis is misleading, especially with bar charts.

You need to do this with Dr. Johnny Fever…

I like how the solve time improves again from .180% to… uh… the second .180% — the chart maker’s BAC tracks with the chart itself apparently 💁‍♂️

first thing i thought of. i might be showing my age

I wonder how much the increase in average time around 0.150% is due to increased BAC or simply mental fatigue from doing it so many times. How would this compare to 160 solves with no alcohol at all?

My friends all learned this and became pretty good at it.

One time, we were drunk in college near the end of the night. One of my friends does blast thru a rubiks cube and says "I can use this to tell how drunk i am". Not 5 minutes later he threw up. XD

Good point. This test needs to be randomized to avoid the confounding factors.

Came here for this!

I don’t understand. How long did you wait between the shots? The alcohol would have to start affecting you first which isn’t really the case if you’re doing back to back shots.

How was BAC measured? Are you just estimating it?

Also it’s an n=1 so we need a Rubik’s cube club or something for replication

Doesn't this show the opposite? He pretty consistently gets worse the higher the alcohol content

There's a notable dip in completion time just beyond BAC 0.12%

The whole thing about the ballmer peak though is that performance is higher than when completely sober

That's not what the XKCD graph shows.

That's exactly what it shows, 0 BAC has a lower performance level than at ~0.14

At the "Ballmer peak", yeah. Performance is lower than when sober everywhere except that point.

That's not the same as "performance always higher when drunk"

That isn't what I was saying. The Ballmer Peak specifically shows that performance at the peak is better than when completely sober. In OP's case, performance was only slightly better than the % above and below it, but still significantly worse than at 0

The baseline/0 BAC is just over 14 seconds. The dip just beyond 0.12 is a smidgen beyond 10.

Can you try doing a scatter plot of (BAC, Solve Time) pairs? The correlation might be better visible there.

Single solve times have a lot of random variance, that could just be a random cube pattern that allowed him to skip several steps when solving. The average dips slightly at that point, but not below the beginning average

Yes, which is why

> This gives *some* evidence for the Ballmer Peak (but not a lot).

Slight dip on the average. One exceptionally quick game. Not conclusive supporting evidence. Some evidence

You need another test to extract the alcohol as the only variable. We need another 160 solves with a shot of water every 20. By comparing the two we can cancel out mind/finger fatigue from the results. Any time differences left should only be from the alcohol.

Oh seconds. I was going for hours.

It’s higher than ballmer but very cool to see. Very real phenomenon

"I swear I'm good to drive officer, just check my 3x3 solve time!"

OP is solving in 12-15 seconds. At that level the algorithms required to solve the cube require some quick analysis of the cube faces at each stage to use the more optimal moves, particularly during the F2L stage. This involves quick mental visualisation to find the corners and matching edges to complete those first layers. I would have expected alcohol to have a bigger impact.

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So if I'm reading this correctly, you're less efficient between 0.150% and 0.180%, but slightly more efficient between 0.180% and... 0.180% again?

Not in this case since he’s just interested in how much the time changes not how fast he solves it.

What I’m hearing here is that I need to get very, very drunk for my finals. Or at least a little drunk. Tipsy. Slightly buzzed…

Yeah the differences are so small that if the y axis started at 0 all the details on the graph would become too small to see.

Maybe the difference could be explained by the taste left in his mouth after the shots.

I also notice when only slightly drunk my brain tends to work a little faster in specific occasions.

E.g. I can write faster and more accurately on my phone when I've had a few beers.

Ballmer Peak is a joke AND this data is (mostly) a joke... but... the two fastest times in their dataset are at about 0.1% and 0.12% (which would show up as a peak).

Relative magnitude of the change is important. If time changes from 10 seconds to 10.1 seconds, it's not the same as time changing from 10 seconds to 20 seconds. If you don't include zero, you can scale the graphs to look the same.

Do the math. Calculate the correlation, (r) and see if it is statistically significant. There is a confound between practice ir fatigue and the independent variable, so as another commenter says, repeat with shots of water instead of alcohol. And it still wouldn’t prove much, because it would be easy to influence the results one way or the other.

In the end its all colours and shapes and op has reached up to 0.2% blood alcohol, which is the limit for driving in many places, I'd say up to that point it makes sense to see little change, it would be later on when I would expect to see impairment showing

Idk, you get to point where you literally don’t even think about it. I was never as good as OP (more in the 20-30s range), but even then there were algorithms that I can done so many thousands of times that I barely even needed to register that there was a pattern. Muscle memory kicks in and just takes care of it.

I haven’t been into it for the past few years, but once I stopped practicing daily, I’d do periodic “check-ins” to see if I still remembered how to solve it. At one point I had gone like 6 months without touching the cube, and was still able to easily solve it. I didn’t even quite remember what the algorithms were or what I was looking for, but muscle memory seems to remember for a lot longer lol. So it doesn’t surprise me that it doesn’t phase him much. Not unless he was really hammered.

0.2% is nearly 3 times the limit for being intoxicated, which is commonly 0.08% in the US.

No, it gives no evidence. Not “not a lot of evidence”. Zero evidence. The “dip” (I wouldn’t call it that) you refer to is two, maybe 3, consecutive data points below the average. Would you call three consecutive coin flips coming up tails evidence of a biased coin? You also need to consider streakiness, warm-up time, all that good stuff. You aren’t as smart as you think you are. You completely misinterpreted that poor persons reply about the ballmer curve!

Ha… well someone got the reference…

Now this is the data we need

Not continuous data, misrepresented graphing.

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Being someone who solves around 15secs, the difference between 20/30 secs vs 12 is abysmal. Yes, one can do the last layer without thinking even a bit, but f2l takes quite a lot of focus at OP's level

Yes, he'd be always able to solve it under ~25secs due to muscle memory, but to keep it that consistent is impressive

What liquor did you use?

And 0.05% is the most common limit worldwide. I don’t think anywhere is at 0.2%.

Accurate BAC devices are readily available and fairly affordable.

looks like .1 BAC is the sweet spot

Interesting experiment and results. As a bit of constructive feedback on the data visualization, I would say that the actual solve times should be points instead of a continuous line. The avg solve time is fine as a line, though.

This is exactly what i was thinking about too! Need more granular shots to prove it. IV schnapps anyone?

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Shouldn't this be a scatter graph? 🤔

To me, evidence of a 'Ballmer peak' would be any evidence of high performance. If this was the only study, which for the comments it is, I would say this leads to an idea that the 'Ballmer peak' is on average slightly lower skill level at the point, but a larger standard deviation of skill level, leading to occasional brilliance while consistent performance is slightly worse than at 0.

I haven't looked up what the actual 'hypothesis' of the Ballmer peak is, but this shows that some elements of high performance could exist and that kind of thing leads to rumors, plus fun experimentation.

But they really measure breath alcohol content rather than blood. There can occasionally be some discrepancy.

I think it’s safe to assume OP didn’t draw 160 blood samples.

Ah, yes. Otherwise known as 'The Doctor Johnny Fever' effect.

Looks like around .05 is ideal.

He was drunk when he made the last two points.

That doesn’t even count as slightly tipsy. Do it again and drink more!

Edit: never mind, the UOM was per cent. Well done! 👍

.18% is over two times the legal driving limit haha. I was having a hard time talking and walking- muscle memory just works in strange ways

It usually takes me 5 minutes or so to do a Rubiks Cube. Extrapolating, my BAC was probably 456%.

Never argue with the data.

What got me is that we use ‰ in Finland. Anything over 0,15% is pretty respectable 😄

What solution do you use for level 3?

What happened during your high peaks?

How long did it take from start to finish and what was your steps? Scramble, Solve, Blow?

Yeah I think I'm getting it mixed up with alcohol on breath levels maybe?

Not sure. The BAC monitor I have reads breath and gives a blood alcohol percentage reading but I can’t speak to all models.

I think you are my spirit animal

This is what I'm here for.

Yeah OP can you get drunk and solve an additional N = 1000 cubes?

If this is accurate it's crazy impressive, most people are either passed out/ throwing up at bathroom/ can't even walk at 0.18% , but here you are solving rubiks in 20seconds..