My ex-wife kept asking me why I constantly whip out the little pocket version of Suduko. My answer is simply “because I suck at it.” Why I would spend hours per week fiddling with a game I’m no good at boggles her mind. What is especially frustrating is that between a head injury I sustained in a car accident that robbed me of my short term memory, and a learning disability that keeps me from keeping rows and columns straight, I should be pulling my hair out.

 

Yet I have this lurid fascination with this game. And it’s precisely because I AM bad at it. It even keeps track of how much time I’ve utterly wasted on the endeavor. My best score is about 12 minutes to solve a puzzle. I’ve done that once, and like a biddy at a slot machine I keep pulling the handle in hopes of winning again.

 

In light of all my brain is not, playing the game requires a very high level of concentration for me. I also experiment with different tricks adapted from by various comp-sci courses and engineering. In the process of playing I’ve discovered a few rules for life.

 

First off, one must always, ALWAYS, have the patience to study the problem before trying to tackle it. When I take the time to simplify the puzzle to the Nth degree, I win every time. If I miss an early “gimme” I discover it 20 minutes later, after that missing piece of data has utterly confounded my analytical skills.

 

Second, If you don’t have enough data, move on. I’m no good at following this advice. I’m one of those guys who, in trying to solve for a square with 2 possibilities tries to analytically crack squares with 5 or more in hopes, HOPES, that one of them will get simpler. All I really achieve is confusion. And like I said, 9 times out of 10 there was a gimme I missed.

 

What’s a gimme? A lot of times squares on the board have on and only one possibility from the outset. As you fill in the gimmes, more gimmes appear. It’s my own term, undoubtedly there is a technical expression for it.

 

“Ok Sean,” you are thinking, “what does this have to do with life?”

 

Well decision making is ALWAYS like a Suduko puzzle. We have a massive matrix of possible solutions. The process of life cements those possibilities and we either find ourselves one step further along the path, or blindly stumbling in a random direction away from it. Every decision we make fills in, or unfills a box.

 

 

Another case I can think of off hand was a design project I saw presented during my time at Drexel. A senior had spent month (and several hundred thousand dollars, albeit donated by the sponsor) to design a fiber-composite body for a solar race car. The Chassis weighed on the order of 15 pounds or so. Well right after he had outlined the structural details, and was all smug that he had solved a truely complex problem.

 

A professor summarized it (paraphrased, this is a recollection from years ago), “What have we saved? You spent $100,000 to make a 15 pound chassis that still has to carry 600 pounds of battery, 200 pounds of solar panel, and 180 pounds of driver. Plus you can’t even repair it.”  

 

Needless to say, the student was mortified. As well he should have been. Just because you CAN do something doesn’t make it a good idea. And more to the point, if he had studied the matrix of possibility, he would have found that for a race car reparability is highly desirable, while weight isn’t nearly as important. Sure if you can make a part lighter great. But it shouldn’t be so expensive that you can’t keep a few spares in the truck.

 

 

Lets say you are planning a vacation. You can spend a lot of time looking at trips to the Mediterranean. But if you have only a few thousand to spend, well you are looking more along the lines of a trip to the Caribbean. Or if you have a few hundred to spend, a trip to the shore. The first question should be “what I want to spend.” Or if cost is not an issue, “what I want to see.”

 

If the answer is, “The beach”, unless you have a fascination for Greek culture, or seeing Italy, or traipsing through Spain, why are you bothering to fly out to the Med? (Assuming one is in North America as I am, of course.). Likewise, if the idea of crowds and traffic don’t appeal to you, why are you looking at the Jersey shore? If you are searching for “adventure” than a cruise is probably the last thing you want to look at. You can spend a lot of time looking through travel guides, or with a little logic you can get to what you really want.

 

But I’m straying off topic once more. Time to get back to real life. Share and enjoy.