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This phenomenon, whereby a person who knows the "trick" to solve a puzzle cannot accurate gauge its difficulty, seems to extend beyond mathematics. Adventure ga
by chongli 7y ago
This phenomenon, whereby a person who knows the "trick" to solve a puzzle cannot accurate gauge its difficulty, seems to extend beyond mathematics. Adventure games (including text-based, parser-driven, and point-and-click) suffer badly from this problem. They are chock-full of puzzles that only make sense in hindsight (if at all). They can be really fun though!
- OscarCunningham 7y agoTanya Khovanova has a paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 with a list of some more of these problems with easy solutions that are hard to find. She calls them "Jewish Problems" because they were used by USSR universities to discriminate against Jewish applicants. The applicants would fail to solve them but the university would justifiably be able to claim they were easy.
- dxbydt 7y agoHey, thank you so much for posting this! I picked a random problem ( the one on logs) in that paper and solved it under 1 minute. I feel like a million bucks now!
- baddox 7y agoBecause of this fact, I can only imagine how difficult game design must be (particularly puzzle games). The "perfect" experience is for the player to have just enough difficult figuring out a solution that they feel clever when they succeed. I remember feeling this way several times in my first play-through of Portal, but then I remember Portal 2 feeling way too "guided" (sometimes even easy), as if they had play-tested it to death.