How Ashley Hatch and Tom Salmon do team blind without talking

At UK Championships 2025, I witnessed something very impressive that I hadn't seen before: Silent team blind. Team Blind is an unofficial event often held at cubing competitions where one person is blindfolded and another sighted person must direct them on what moves to do in order to solve the cube, sophistication in this ranges from simply 'turn the front layer clockwise 90 degrees' to using actual cube notation 'F', to at the highest level, having names for common triggers such as 'sledge (R' F R F'), 'Left Join' (L' U' L) which speed up the process of directing during F2L (first 2 layers).

The rules of Team Blind have been altered in the past year or two after Tommy Cherry and Elliot Kobelansky essentially ruined the previous iteration of the event at the US national cubing championships. In the 15 seconds of inspection time, Elliot Kobelansky did regular blind memorization, told Tommy Cherry all that memorization (about 20 letters), Tommy Cherry then executed it under the blindfold in 8 seconds, essentially setting a completely unbeatable record. Now Team Blind is usually done without inspection so blindsolving methods are not likely to work as well.

While usually, the sighted cuber will give moves as directions, Tom Salmon and Ashley Hatch have developed a method that requires no talking, they have developed a code of slaps on the back which refer to specific movements on the cube, a slap lower down the back may refer to a D move, some triggers can also be denoted by specific sequences of slaps, during last layer, Tom Salmon may just draw the letter representing the PLL case on Ashley Hatch's back. Here is my short showcasing this (this turned out to be my most viewed short in a long time):

I later got to see them do a few other challenges such as Double Team Blind, they used the same slapping technique but this time it wasn't to direct the solver on what moves to make but to direct someone who was also blindfolded on what moves to tell someone else (also blindfolded) to make. Tom Salmon was the only one who could see the cube, Ashley Hatch was blindfolded and so was Glib Vedmid, Glib had to solve the cube, Tom then slapped Ashley to direct which moves to make, Ashley then converted it into normal cubing notation to direct Glib on what moves to make, this creates questions also on how long a chain you could potentially create doing this.