The way I read the combination of those two bullets was “You can roll the ball down the ramp and stop it at the bottom, but in that case, the ball can’t start at the top of the ramp, you need to put it down at the halfway point or something like that”.
In retrospect I guess “end-to-end run” meant “from the ramp to the cup” but for some reason, I interpreted it as “from one end of the ramp to the other”.
Confirming that I came to this later, and I still thought this was metaphorically going to lose a bunch of points versus not doing it since the metaphorically similar action does not seem especially safe and also it seemed to screen off the actually hard parts of the problem (and thus felt too easy).
Getting around having to solve the hard parts of a problem entirely and still getting to the correct solution is what I’d generally consider an intelligent approach.
Sure, it might feel a lot less satisfying than actually figuring out all the details, but it is goal-oriented and I’d say goal-oriented thinking is very encouraged on a “time-limited you only have one try to get it right”- problem.
I suppose this actually raises the question which shortcuts are allowed and which are likely to cause issues later if not figured out at the start since there were ways around having to do that.
Either way, I interpret the existence of a tight time span as: “You don’t get to figure out every detail of this problem.”
My takeaway is that the metaphorical style points only start mattering AFTER you have any valid solution at all.
The way I read the combination of those two bullets was “You can roll the ball down the ramp and stop it at the bottom, but in that case, the ball can’t start at the top of the ramp, you need to put it down at the halfway point or something like that”.
In retrospect I guess “end-to-end run” meant “from the ramp to the cup” but for some reason, I interpreted it as “from one end of the ramp to the other”.
That’s useful, thanks. I’ve edited to clarify.
Confirming that I came to this later, and I still thought this was metaphorically going to lose a bunch of points versus not doing it since the metaphorically similar action does not seem especially safe and also it seemed to screen off the actually hard parts of the problem (and thus felt too easy).
Getting around having to solve the hard parts of a problem entirely and still getting to the correct solution is what I’d generally consider an intelligent approach.
Sure, it might feel a lot less satisfying than actually figuring out all the details, but it is goal-oriented and I’d say goal-oriented thinking is very encouraged on a “time-limited you only have one try to get it right”- problem.
I suppose this actually raises the question which shortcuts are allowed and which are likely to cause issues later if not figured out at the start since there were ways around having to do that.
Either way, I interpret the existence of a tight time span as: “You don’t get to figure out every detail of this problem.”
My takeaway is that the metaphorical style points only start mattering AFTER you have any valid solution at all.