There’s a nice board + online game called Codenames. The basic idea is: you have two teams, each team split into two roles, the spymaster and the operatives. All players see an array of 25 cards with a single word on each of them. Everybody sees the words, but only the spymasters see the color of these cards. They can be blue or red, for the two teams, or white for neutral. The teams then take turns. Each time, the spymaster tries to come up with a single freely chosen word that would then allow their operatives to select, by association to that word, as large as possible a number of cards of their team’s color. The spymaster hence communicates that word, as well as the number of cards to be associated with that word, to the rest of their team. The operatives then discuss amongst each other which cards are most likely to fit that provided word[1].
I’ve played this game with a number of people, and noticed that many seem to play this in “forward” mode: spymasters often just try to find some plausible word that matches some of their team’s cards, almost as if they were trying to solve the problem: if somebody saw what I saw, they should agree this word makes sense. Whereas the better question would be: which word, if my team heard it, would make them choose the cards that have our team’s color? And the operatives on the other hand usually just check plainly which cards fit this word best? But almost nobody asks themselves if the selection of cards I’ve picked now really is the one the spymaster had in mind, would they have picked the word that they did?
To name a concrete example of the latter point, let’s say the spymaster said the word “transportation” and the number 2, so you know you’re looking for exactly two cards with some word on them that relates to transportation. And after looking at all available cards, there are three candidates: “wheel”, “windshield” and “boat”. Forward reasoning would allow basically any 2 out of these 3 cards, so you basically had to guess. But with inverse reasoning you would at least notice that, if “wheel” and “windshield” were the two words the spymaster was hinting at, they would most certainly have used “car” rather than “transportation”. But as they did not, in fact, choose “car”, you can be pretty sure that “boat” should be among your selection, so you can at least be pretty sure about that one word.
Of course one explanation for all of this may be that Codenames is, after all, just a game, and doing all this inverse reasoning is a bit effortful. Still it made me realize how rarely people naturally go into “inverse mode”, even in such a toy setting where it would be comparably clean and easy to apply.
I guess explaining the rules of a game is another problem that can be approached in forward or inverse ways. The forward way would just be to explain the rules in whichever way seems reasonable to you as someone familiar with the game. Whereas the inverse way would be to think about how you can best explain things in a way such that somebody who has no clue about the game will quickly get an idea of what’s going on. I certainly tried to do the latter, but, ehhh, who knows if I succeeded.
Bonus Example: The Game Codenames
There’s a nice board + online game called Codenames. The basic idea is: you have two teams, each team split into two roles, the spymaster and the operatives. All players see an array of 25 cards with a single word on each of them. Everybody sees the words, but only the spymasters see the color of these cards. They can be blue or red, for the two teams, or white for neutral. The teams then take turns. Each time, the spymaster tries to come up with a single freely chosen word that would then allow their operatives to select, by association to that word, as large as possible a number of cards of their team’s color. The spymaster hence communicates that word, as well as the number of cards to be associated with that word, to the rest of their team. The operatives then discuss amongst each other which cards are most likely to fit that provided word[1].
I’ve played this game with a number of people, and noticed that many seem to play this in “forward” mode: spymasters often just try to find some plausible word that matches some of their team’s cards, almost as if they were trying to solve the problem: if somebody saw what I saw, they should agree this word makes sense. Whereas the better question would be: which word, if my team heard it, would make them choose the cards that have our team’s color? And the operatives on the other hand usually just check plainly which cards fit this word best? But almost nobody asks themselves if the selection of cards I’ve picked now really is the one the spymaster had in mind, would they have picked the word that they did?
To name a concrete example of the latter point, let’s say the spymaster said the word “transportation” and the number 2, so you know you’re looking for exactly two cards with some word on them that relates to transportation. And after looking at all available cards, there are three candidates: “wheel”, “windshield” and “boat”. Forward reasoning would allow basically any 2 out of these 3 cards, so you basically had to guess. But with inverse reasoning you would at least notice that, if “wheel” and “windshield” were the two words the spymaster was hinting at, they would most certainly have used “car” rather than “transportation”. But as they did not, in fact, choose “car”, you can be pretty sure that “boat” should be among your selection, so you can at least be pretty sure about that one word.
Of course one explanation for all of this may be that Codenames is, after all, just a game, and doing all this inverse reasoning is a bit effortful. Still it made me realize how rarely people naturally go into “inverse mode”, even in such a toy setting where it would be comparably clean and easy to apply.
I guess explaining the rules of a game is another problem that can be approached in forward or inverse ways. The forward way would just be to explain the rules in whichever way seems reasonable to you as someone familiar with the game. Whereas the inverse way would be to think about how you can best explain things in a way such that somebody who has no clue about the game will quickly get an idea of what’s going on. I certainly tried to do the latter, but, ehhh, who knows if I succeeded.