Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t (2011)

The hard part here is encoding a heuristic that is capable of improving the time complexity of the naive exponential algorithm asymptotically so that it becomes useful. People are really impressive. They're capable of realizing where they broke something and seeing when continuing down a path won't lead to a solution, which lets them mentally prune the search tree dramatically. Getting a computer to do the same...

For fun: if you can encode a human's cognition and spatial awareness for things like this, you can probably do the same for NLP, then write a tl;dr app that massively outperforms summly and sell it to Google for more than $30M. :)

Very satisfying post.

It confirms one of my opinions about proficiency in general. Proficiency has a lot to do with pattern recognition and having access to multiple tools, each tailored to solving a particular problem. Figuring out which tool to use for a given problem is a key aspect to proficiency, but the time it takes to carefully select the proper tool can often be trumped by simply choosing always the same tool and succeed or fail really fast. More often than not, the pattern matching after the first pass will be simpler because parts of the problem will be solved already.

I started thinking about it when I was a kid discussing the best football (as in soccer) players with my friends. I always favoured players who could use both feet and their head equally, able to figure out the path of least resistance every time, but one of my friends would say that the very best players would only use one foot, their best foot, and focus on their placement to maximize the use of it in every occasion. In other words, when the stars align they are unmatched, and their whole strategy revolves on making those stars align as often as possible, rather than on figuring out how to play on a given spot.

It made a lot of sense back then, as the one-trick-ponies could easily and consistently out-play the jack-of-all-trades if they had a whole team dedicated to serve their right foot as often as possible. I find it eerie that it still does make sense in the context of your game, and many others. When time is of the essence and wrong moves only cost the time they take to perform, you can either spend your precious time thinking of the correct play, or spend it doing something that doesn't require you to think at all, and adjust as you go using pattern recognition on smaller subsets.

This really made me reflect on how careful logical deductions affected my life. Being careful and safe wasn't as rewarding as jumping into something and learning from it.

I was inspired to write this post about my experience - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5453761

Some people have the "unfair advantage" of being able to pick up a domain of expertise and excel at it really fast. As the startup grows in reach and complexity, those guys really stand out. The reason might be because they can spin every problem into proper nails for the expert to hammer.

Hey, you have discovered that, to make a game, you have to give it to other people and see how they play...

Well done!

If anyone is interested in game design, I'd recommend this book [1]. Yep, the most important part is make something, give players to fiddle around and iterate to next version.

[1] http://artofgamedesign.com/