Don’t Fall Into Rabbit Holes

SO! There I was, trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, learn about deep learning, and teach myself enough puzzle logic to create credible puzzles for the Cinnamon Frost books, and I find myself debugging the fine details of a visualization system I’ve developed in Mathematica to analyze the distribution of problems in an odd middle chapter of Raymond Smullyan’s The Lady or the Tiger.

I meant well! Really I did. I was going to write a post about how finding a solution is just a little bit harder than you normally think, and how insight sometimes comes after letting things sit.

But the tools I was creating didn’t do what I wanted, so I went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole trying to visualize them.

The short answer seems to be that there’s no “there” there and that further pursuit of this sub-problem will take me further and further away from the real problem: writing great puzzles!

I learned a lot – about numbers, about how things could combinatorially explode, about Ulam Spirals and how to code them algorithmically. I even learned something about how I, particularly, fail in these cases.

But it didn’t provide the insights I wanted. Feynman warned about this: he called it “the computer disease”, worrying about the formatting of the printout so much you forget about the answer you’re trying to produce, and it can strike anyone in my line of work.

Back to that work.

-the Centaur