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I'm also ADHD, and I'm completely on the same page as you regarding stuff like leetcode. How do you feel about puzzles in general? I have a really strong anti

I'm also ADHD, and I'm completely on the same page as you regarding stuff like leetcode. How do you feel about puzzles in general? I have a really strong antipathy towards 'solving' anything that I know is (a) already solved and (b) where the solution process is not interesting in and of itself. So I hate, hate, hate puzzles. Your post made me wonder if there's a link between ADHD and finding explicitly pointless challenges unbearable. It feels kind of intuitively true that ADHD predisposes one to cut a lot of mental chaff in order to focus on stuff that's engaging and interesting; a puzzle is kind of explicitly chaff, it's something you have to manipulate in some way to get some predefined result. The normal trick if you're up against this kind of intense, adhd-driven disinterest in something is to see if you can twist it in some way until it's interesting for you again. So instead of seeing the puzzle itself as the challenge, turn it into a training process for something for something you consider worthwhile.

josephg 5y ago
Weird. I'm (probably) ADHD spectrum. (I've never been properly diagnosed, but its all very familiar). I love puzzles though. They're short, they have a right and wrong answer. Optimization problems are especially satisfying because you can get a score, and improve on it over time when you come up with clever ideas. I've never done any problems on leetcode, but thats absolutely my wheelhouse and I love that stuff. A few weeks ago I invented a new String (Rope[1]) class by combining skip lists and gap buffers. I don't know if anyone else has ever done that before. Its 3x faster than the next fastest library I could find. There's probably an academic paper in that, but that sounds really boring. Maybe its useful for other people, but I think if you said "leetcode is a training process" to me, that'd make it more boring. For me the fun part is finding those puzzles in regular code. ("Sure this algorithm is simple but its n^2. I wonder if there's an O(n log n) approach out there somewhere..?") [1] A rope is a "fat string" for text editors and things, where you want to insert / delete characters at arbitrary positions. My library is here - https://crates.io/crates/jumprope https://crates.io/crates/jumprope
- pasabagi 5y ago
  Perhaps it's more attitude, then? What you said does sound interesting - I just never think like that when I'm solving puzzles. When I think puzzle, my mind goes to something like a rubics cube - an object where there's some trick that once you've learned, the object becomes 'solved'. That abrogates any need for creativity, since the solution is already preordained in the design of the puzzle itself, so I just get irritated and (usually) find some way to cheat it.
  - josephg 5y ago
    Yeah; I never learned to solve rubicks cubes for exactly that reason - what’s the point of memorising a solved algorithm that only works on this one problem anyway? But plenty of algorithmic ideas are broadly applicable and useful. Eg, b-trees, bloom filters and priority queues have some wild uses across a host of problems. Those tools strike my fancy.
Fattestmoron 5y ago
I actually like puzzles where I see that it involves analytical thinking, or creativity. Open-ended stuff where I am allowed to let my mind take over and not worry about a time limit or some artificial constraints. I also find it unbearable to "solve" something I see the solution to, or can describe how to solve it. In fact, if I see the solution, I find myself unable to go through the steps to actually do it, especially if there is a time constraint involved. The trick you have described was my way to do the problems in my spare time back when I hadn't seen them before, but the whole problem is that leetcode problems are designed for an incredibly narrow range of solutions. Analytical solutions that have poor worst case run times, but incredibly good average case run times are not allowed and a lot of mathematical approaches involving matrices and exploiting vectorization aren't allowed either. Leetcode-style problems force you to put your mind in a very narrow box and I simply can't do that. I've always had a very great need of orthogonalization in how I think and operate; i.e. if something doesn't stimulate me enough, I need another concurrent activity that is completely different to keep me motivated.

josephg 5y ago

Weird. I'm (probably) ADHD spectrum. (I've never been properly diagnosed, but its all very familiar). I love puzzles though. They're short, they have a right and wrong answer. Optimization problems are especially satisfying because you can get a score, and improve on it over time when you come up with clever ideas. I've never done any problems on leetcode, but thats absolutely my wheelhouse and I love that stuff. A few weeks ago I invented a new String (Rope[1]) class by combining skip lists and gap buffers. I don't know if anyone else has ever done that before. Its 3x faster than the next fastest library I could find. There's probably an academic paper in that, but that sounds really boring. Maybe its useful for other people, but I think if you said "leetcode is a training process" to me, that'd make it more boring. For me the fun part is finding those puzzles in regular code. ("Sure this algorithm is simple but its n^2. I wonder if there's an O(n log n) approach out there somewhere..?") [1] A rope is a "fat string" for text editors and things, where you want to insert / delete characters at arbitrary positions. My library is here - https://crates.io/crates/jumprope https://crates.io/crates/jumprope

pasabagi 5y ago
Perhaps it's more attitude, then? What you said does sound interesting - I just never think like that when I'm solving puzzles. When I think puzzle, my mind goes to something like a rubics cube - an object where there's some trick that once you've learned, the object becomes 'solved'. That abrogates any need for creativity, since the solution is already preordained in the design of the puzzle itself, so I just get irritated and (usually) find some way to cheat it.
- josephg 5y ago
  Yeah; I never learned to solve rubicks cubes for exactly that reason - what’s the point of memorising a solved algorithm that only works on this one problem anyway? But plenty of algorithmic ideas are broadly applicable and useful. Eg, b-trees, bloom filters and priority queues have some wild uses across a host of problems. Those tools strike my fancy.

Fattestmoron 5y ago

I actually like puzzles where I see that it involves analytical thinking, or creativity. Open-ended stuff where I am allowed to let my mind take over and not worry about a time limit or some artificial constraints. I also find it unbearable to "solve" something I see the solution to, or can describe how to solve it. In fact, if I see the solution, I find myself unable to go through the steps to actually do it, especially if there is a time constraint involved. The trick you have described was my way to do the problems in my spare time back when I hadn't seen them before, but the whole problem is that leetcode problems are designed for an incredibly narrow range of solutions. Analytical solutions that have poor worst case run times, but incredibly good average case run times are not allowed and a lot of mathematical approaches involving matrices and exploiting vectorization aren't allowed either. Leetcode-style problems force you to put your mind in a very narrow box and I simply can't do that. I've always had a very great need of orthogonalization in how I think and operate; i.e. if something doesn't stimulate me enough, I need another concurrent activity that is completely different to keep me motivated.