Talk:1982 World Rubik's Cube Championship

1982 World Championship names

Here is what I think may be wrong with the names of the competitors for the 1982 World Rubik's Cube Championship. I know some of this may include dreaded "original research", but the fact is I don't think anyone else has looked into this in 35 years.

Right, this is the list of names which are currently (2018) on the WCA database for the 1982 world championship:

• Minh Thai
• Guus Razoux Schultz
• Zoltán Lábas
• Lars Petrus
• Ken`ichi Ueno (上野健一)
• Jerome Jean-Charles
• Julian Chilvers
• Duc Trinh
• Giuseppe Romeo
• Jessica Fridrich
• Eduardo Valdivia Chacon
• Luc Van Laethem
• Jozsef Borsos
• Roland Brinkmann
• Jari Sandqvist
• Manuel Galrinho
• Piotr Sebeński
• Svilen Tenev
• Josef Trajber

There are seven names on this list which I think could or should be rendered differently:

• Kenichi Ueno
• Jérôme Jean-Charles
• Eduardo Valdivia Chacón
• Luc van Laethem
• József Borsos
• Ronald Brinkmann
• Piotr Serbeński

Ambiguous cases

• Kenichi Ueno: David Singmaster (Cubic Circular 1982) in 1982 placed an apostrophe in Ueno's name. There is a Wikipedia article on the "Ken'ichi" name. So this is a valid transliteration even though for most (all?) other Japanese names on the WCA database they don't usually use this apostrophe mark. (It apparently determines syllable weight - or some such thing).

• Luc van Laetham: The "van" part in these names can often be rendered with both a lower or upper case v. David Singmaster used the lower case. However performing a Google search for the "van Laethem" name seems to reveal that "Van Laethem" is often preferred to "van Laethem". I can't say for certain on this one.

Mistakes with accents

Three names Jérôme Jean-Charles, Eduardo Valdivia Chacón, and József Borsos, are missing accents on the WCA list. These are all trivial. David Singmaster seems to have avoided using these accents (hard to type them back then) in his 1982 list (except oddly for Zoltán Lábas).

• Singmaster does in fact give Jean-Charles name properly in his first Cubic Circular in 1981: "The French national finals were held recently and Jérôme Jean-Charles won with a time of 25.6 seconds."

• For Chacón's name, here's a link to a page about the Aniversario Eduardo Valdivia tournament which took place in Peru in 2012 in which he was guest-of-honour and the page gives his name as Eduardo Valdivia Chacón.

• As for Borsos's name - this is is a harder one to definitively prove. All I can say is this name József is Hungarian (Borsos came from Yugoslavia, but presumably from a Hungarian background) and is spelled with an accent over the o.

Two spelling mistakes

• Ronald Brinkmann: This confusion about whether he is Ronald or Roland is a long-standing one. The main reasons I think he's Ronald is the following:

• • David Singmaster in both 1981 and 1982 calls him Ronald. e.g. in 1981 he says: "In Harburg, Hamburg, Germany, a 16 year old boy, Ronald Brinkmann, solved his maths teachers cube overnight "
  • The Guinness Book of Records in 1983 calls him Ronald.
  • George Helm who owns every 1980's Rubik's cube book in existence, owns a copy of Brinkmann's (self-published?) solution from 1980. He lists the book under "BRINKMANN Ronald"

• Piotr Serbeński: This is a slightly trickier one. Although the WCA lists him under "Sebeński". David Singmaster in 1982 calls him "Serbenski". The variant "Sebenski" does seem to exist, at least outside Poland. However searching for these names on Polish Wikipedia seems to demonstrate that Serbeński is the correct form of the name within Poland. I think Singmaster spelling is correct again, but he's once again missed out an accent. The WCA on the other hand has included the accent but got the spelling wrong.

Finally I'll mention where I think the WCA may have got their list from. They obviously didn't use Singmaster's 1982 Cubic Cicular list now on Jaap's site. But there are two other very early internet lists for the 1982 world championship (neither of them perfect). One is Jessica Fridrich's list but that doesn't match up very well with the WCA list. However an even older list is this Rubik's Cube World Championship list on Mark Longridge's Domain of the Cube website - one of the earliest Rubik's Cube websites on the internet dating to 1995. It closely matches the WCA list with the same spelling mistakes and lack of accents excepting Zoltán Lábas. I think someone in the early 2000's entered that list, or one very like it into the WCA database.

Anyway I've restored two names - Ken'ichi Ueno and Luc Van Laethem - back to what they were, since the WCA form of the names are clearly just as valid. I think the changes I made to the other five names are correct, however I don't have ideal references for József Borsos or Piotr Serbeński. Pasicles (talk) 17:44, 29 July 2018 (UTC)