February 16, 2020
I like solving puzzles. I'm terrible at solving problems, obviously. I've got lots of problems and I usually do everything in my power to avoid solving them. With lots of problems, there might not be a solution or there might be multiple obscure solutions. Or else in solving them you might create new problems. Or, and I think this is the case with most problems that anyone has for more than five minutes, there might be a workable solution that you only discover after pursuing wrong solutions for who knows how long, and there's no way of telling the difference until it's much too late to remember where you took a dubious turn. I have some kind of intellectual disability that means I'm usually doing the wrong thing, but knowing it doesn't keep me from doing it.
Puzzles are like toy problems. Really good ones, for me at least, let me make wrong moves, but wait a bit before revealing them as wrong, and usually they have exactly one solution. One of my favorite video games I played last year was The Witness which, other than the kind of cheap quotes about the search for Truth or whatever, has a lot of good design ideas, and it's built on a base of really solid, novel, path-drawing puzzles. (Will probably write something about that game later) I recently found a puzzle that uses the same sort of rules that I really enjoyed. The clever bit is that it derives a unique solution from simple rules and few initial hints.