I actually participated in the original relay experiment described here as one of the players, and this seems like a good place to share my experience with it.
The format of the iterative collaboration with different people felt a lot like collaborating with myself across time, when I might drop a problem to think about something else and then come back to it. If I haven’t taken the right notes on what I tried and (crucially) what I should do next, I have to pay a tax in time and mental resources to figure out what I did.
It was interesting to experience it in this case, as the combination of the time limit and collaboration with other people meant that I felt a lot of pressure each time figuring out what happens.
More concretely, for some problems, I could actually understand the problem quickly enough and follow along with the current solution so far. For others, I would be greeted with 10 page google doc, documenting all the things that were tried and without a clear next step. In a few cases, it took me 10 minutes just to read through the full problem and things that were tried and I didn’t even have time to rephrase it.
The cases where I felt I made the most progress on the problem, there was a clear next step (or list of possible steps) that I could implement. For instance, for one of the prime problems a clear intermediate step was that we needed a fast primality test, and that was a feasible 10 min implementation that didn’t need understanding of the full problem.
I still think a lot about my experiment in the Relay, as it has affected how I think about documenting my progress on my projects so that I can take them up faster next time.
I actually participated in the original relay experiment described here as one of the players, and this seems like a good place to share my experience with it.
The format of the iterative collaboration with different people felt a lot like collaborating with myself across time, when I might drop a problem to think about something else and then come back to it. If I haven’t taken the right notes on what I tried and (crucially) what I should do next, I have to pay a tax in time and mental resources to figure out what I did.
It was interesting to experience it in this case, as the combination of the time limit and collaboration with other people meant that I felt a lot of pressure each time figuring out what happens.
More concretely, for some problems, I could actually understand the problem quickly enough and follow along with the current solution so far. For others, I would be greeted with 10 page google doc, documenting all the things that were tried and without a clear next step. In a few cases, it took me 10 minutes just to read through the full problem and things that were tried and I didn’t even have time to rephrase it.
The cases where I felt I made the most progress on the problem, there was a clear next step (or list of possible steps) that I could implement. For instance, for one of the prime problems a clear intermediate step was that we needed a fast primality test, and that was a feasible 10 min implementation that didn’t need understanding of the full problem.
I still think a lot about my experiment in the Relay, as it has affected how I think about documenting my progress on my projects so that I can take them up faster next time.