![]() Luckily, we have a wonderful gift for metaphor.īy a gift for metaphor I mean we have the ability to see similarities between seemingly disparate things. It would take you days to solve a problem by just trying every possible machine. ![]() You can put a stick or a wheel anywhere and connect them to anything. In Fantastic Contraption permuting is very hard. It doesn’t explain how people make leaps of intuition, and it doesn’t explain how people play games with very large solution spaces like Fantastic Contraption. So permuting is an obvious part of problem solving but it’s clearly not the whole story. It’s super versatile (you can apply it to pretty much any problem, regardless of how diverse) and it’s generally pretty effective, if laborious. To do it all you need is two hands and a memory. Permutation is our go-to workhorse for getting things done. When you are thinking out every possible outcome of a chess move you are permuting. When you solved one of those “get the metal loop off the rope” puzzles and it just falls apart in your hands you are solving by permutation. When you’re just “playing around with something” you are permuting. A lot of puzzles are solved by permutation alone. I don’t think the idea of just trying every possible action is going to shock anyone but from playtesting puzzle games I think you’d be surprised just how important permuting is to our problem solving. I have believed permutation to be super important for a few years now. Permutation just means “trying everything”. I think there are two major components to our problem solving. It’s probably shallow, wrong, and not worth anything, but I’m going to subject it to you anyway. I’ve come about these ideas from reading a few books, some introspection, the rope experiment I mentioned last time, and watching a ton of playtesting of puzzle games. Nevertheless I have recently contrived a crude theory of human problem solving in my own head. His book is still pretty theoretical but it has a lot of great ideas that have been slowly sinking into my thinking. Although I will heavily recommend Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence. Unfortunately my searches aren’t bringing up as much as you might think. ![]() This is the kind of topic you’d think you could just find a couple of books to read or fish out a couple of papers to get some insight. ![]() ![]() I’ve been trying to tease out the constituent parts of human problem solving for a little while now. ![]()
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