I’ve only played Zendo once. As I understand it, there are are a small number of pieces to make rules about, while rules can be arbitrarily complex. So in this situation you could indeed get better at modeling your fellow players and become more efficient at winning.
In that perspective, playing Understand is a bit like playing Zendo against the game’s designer, who has hand-crafted ~130 levels (rulesets) à 5-10 screens (koans), though you’re not only trying to guess the rules but also to draw paths on each screen which satisfy them. Anyway, this means that the levels are a finite resource. So to me efficiency doesn’t quite seem like the right goal for playing the game.
In a spirit of deliberate practice, I think to get the most practice of rationalist techniques out of Understand, one might:
early on, try to understand all the subtle ways in which the game gives you feedback or evidence
in each level, try to discover the rules while doing as little experimentation (drawing paths) as possible, as if doing each experiment was expensive
try to notice sensations like confusion or surprise, which can give valuable information regarding fruitful hypotheses to pursue
keep play sessions relatively short, since practice sessions presumably hit diminishing returns at some point
And so on.
Conversely, if you’re sure you’ve correctly identified the rules of a level, and nonetheless find a few screens unsolvably difficult, from the POV of deliberately practicing rationalist techniques I see little reason not to ask for hints or outright look up solutions for these screens. I like puzzle games and mostly enjoyed that part, too; but that’s not why I recommended the game here.
I’ve only played Zendo once. As I understand it, there are are a small number of pieces to make rules about, while rules can be arbitrarily complex. So in this situation you could indeed get better at modeling your fellow players and become more efficient at winning.
In that perspective, playing Understand is a bit like playing Zendo against the game’s designer, who has hand-crafted ~130 levels (rulesets) à 5-10 screens (koans), though you’re not only trying to guess the rules but also to draw paths on each screen which satisfy them. Anyway, this means that the levels are a finite resource. So to me efficiency doesn’t quite seem like the right goal for playing the game.
In a spirit of deliberate practice, I think to get the most practice of rationalist techniques out of Understand, one might:
early on, try to understand all the subtle ways in which the game gives you feedback or evidence
in each level, try to discover the rules while doing as little experimentation (drawing paths) as possible, as if doing each experiment was expensive
try to notice sensations like confusion or surprise, which can give valuable information regarding fruitful hypotheses to pursue
keep play sessions relatively short, since practice sessions presumably hit diminishing returns at some point
And so on.
Conversely, if you’re sure you’ve correctly identified the rules of a level, and nonetheless find a few screens unsolvably difficult, from the POV of deliberately practicing rationalist techniques I see little reason not to ask for hints or outright look up solutions for these screens. I like puzzle games and mostly enjoyed that part, too; but that’s not why I recommended the game here.