Pinnacle wrote:
The main thing that makes DROD compelling is a certain cycle that happens within a room.
That's true of general problem solving. It's where things like the XY Problem¹ come from (different X and Y). What you're missing is:
5b) If you have been doing this indefinitely, start repeating from 2, because your assumption on X or² Y is probably wrong.
Watching beginner LPs reveals how beginners are really playing a different and harder game. There's a form of unstable equilibrium, where an experienced player can quickly stop things from being a problem and thus never even sees (let alone solves) the problems that a beginner runs into (and sometimes overcomes). I noticed this first when I first played KDD 2.0... which was made easier by the addition of things like undo and an onscreen clock and the ability to click on orbs³ etc., but not so much from remembering things about when I played KDD before. If anything, those probably hurt me more than helped... I was far better off just evaluating things from my new experience. Rooms that were difficult and long I could now do in much less time because I didn't go making additional problems for myself. You can see that in these LPs. For example, in 11:4N, Alex had a mistaken assumption that stepping on any fuse was bad (not just endpoints)... he still managed to do the room, which is hard enough without that added restriction. In 15:1W, he comes up with the best place for the first decoy, which essentially solves the room. But since he hadn't seen the diagonal shortcut, it failed him and he went back to a weaker position, and got stuck on solving the room with the that position (instead of recognizing that the new information solves what was wrong with the better position... and hits less than a minute after), which just meant he dropped new problems on himself. Which isn't to say that experienced players don't create additional problems for themselves, you just get somewhat less prone to it and realize the importance of 5b above... if things are seeming overly complicated, sometimes it's best to go back and check the original assumptions, information you've uncovered since starting the room might well change what you think of them (which is one thing behind why posting to H&S sometimes solves rooms... it makes you look at assumptions that you haven't thought about for a while).
¹ Person wants to do X, looks at it, finds that it would be easy if they could do X'. Looking at X', that would be easy if X"
was done, and so on until you get to Y. Y tends to be ridiculous or impossible and probably has little to do with X anymore. This is the question people will eventually give up and ask when they go looking for help, so it's important when helping people that you recognize a Y question, and first ask "
what were you originally trying to do?"
to get X, because often the error was that they missed the easy solution there, and that's what they really need help with. One advantage with DROD is that X is always given when someone asks a question about a room, because it is the room. Which makes the XY Problem not much of a problem to worry about in H&S, but something to keep in mind when solving rooms.
² Note that's not an exclusive xor.
³ I kind of miss the old "
testing phase puzzle"
, which was about figuring out the quickest way to get to every orb and hit it multiple times. There are little tricks and challenges to it that make it fun in some rooms, if you're willing to accept it as a minigame that allows you to experience some of the room before getting down to solving it. Like orb puzzles, they're pretty fun if you treat them as puzzles you solve with heuristics and not something you just bang on orbs hoping to stumble on the solution until you give up and toss it to a program that will brute force the solution.
[Last edited by bwross at 05-06-2014 02:18 AM]
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Definitely an unfeature for me... but I'll probably learn to hate it less than builders.
)