What I’m curious about is how you balance this with the art of examining your assumptions.
Puzzle games are a good way of examining how my own mind works, and I often find that I go through an algorithm like:
Do I see the obvious answer?
What are a few straightforward things I could try?
Then Step 3 I see as similar to your maze-solving method:
What are the required steps to solve this? What elements constrain the search space?
But I often find that for difficult puzzles, a fourth step is required:
What assumptions am I making, that would lead me to overlook the correct answer if the assumption was false?
For instance, I may think a lever can only be pulled, and not pushed—or I may be operating under a much harder to understand assumption, like “In this maze, the only thing that matters are visual elements” when it turns out the solution to this puzzle actually involved auditory cues.
What I’m curious about is how you balance this with the art of examining your assumptions.
Puzzle games are a good way of examining how my own mind works, and I often find that I go through an algorithm like:
Do I see the obvious answer?
What are a few straightforward things I could try?
Then Step 3 I see as similar to your maze-solving method:
What are the required steps to solve this? What elements constrain the search space?
But I often find that for difficult puzzles, a fourth step is required:
What assumptions am I making, that would lead me to overlook the correct answer if the assumption was false?
For instance, I may think a lever can only be pulled, and not pushed—or I may be operating under a much harder to understand assumption, like “In this maze, the only thing that matters are visual elements” when it turns out the solution to this puzzle actually involved auditory cues.