Comments on: If there was one thing you wish you had known before…

By: Harry Wood

Harry Wood — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:39:07 +0000

Well Sudoku is entertainment. Entertainment is inherently wasteful. It’s one of those things people do to burn up their “cognitive surplus” as Clay Shirky calls it. In this talk http://blip.tv/file/855937/ …he’s comparing people who watch TV with people who contribute to wikipedia

I’m not sure whether Sudoku counts as a positive or negative force in this scheme of things. It’s probably more positive than watching TV, but you’re right, it’s an artificial problem, so a fairly non-productive waste of brainpower. People should save up their cognitive surplus to spend on building something like wikipedia or solving climate change, poverty and disease.

Of course the really wasteful people spend weeks and weeks of their lives devising puzzles for other people to waste time try to solve

By: Sjors Provoost

Sjors Provoost — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:54:50 +0000

@chris: of course, I have no objections against trying to find better solutions. I guess the 80/20 rule will apply at some point (perfectionism), but that was not where I was getting at.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:59:50 +0000

Really interesting post, and I agree with it, there’s only one exception: what if you can solve the problem in a better way? Not all problems are either \solved\ or \unsolved\, lots of problems were thought to be solved but somebody came up with a better, or more general solution. However, I agree that if we would spend all our time thinking about climate change instead of Sudoko’s, the world would probably be a better place…

By: Subhodip Biswas

Subhodip Biswas — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:19:49 +0000

+1 to your point . If i had know what i need before the start of program , my plans would been diifferent and overall may be the project be the least interesting one .

its our nature of constantly evolve and grow .

but again .. theres always two ways of viewing a topic . .

anyways nice post .

By: Sjors

Sjors — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 11:05:19 +0000

@Ben

You are completely right; there is nothing wrong with using puzzles to train the mind.

What worries me is that many (e.g.) Sudoko solvers have no intention of ever moving beyond the realm of puzzles.

So I should rephrase my case a bit: everyone should, while developing their mind, strive to solve as many real world problems as possible.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:18:23 +0000

What would you tell a child? To stop learning to read and write, but instead solve world poverty? Puzzles like Sudoko exist for learning; they develop the mind. Maybe somebody with the logic skills garnered from solving puzzles will some day fix climate change!