I want to be the kind of person who enjoys puzzles . . .

[xiphias]

So, over at today's IRREGULAR WEBCOMIC, David Morgan-Mar discusses the creation of good puzzles, a hobby which a number of you share. And he gives a bunch of examples of puzzles that he and his friends created.

And a lot of them look fun to me. So I print out a couple, and I figure out Step 1 in them, and then I start looking for the twist/looking for Step 2, and just don't have the mental energy to care enough to do it.

Now, see, in my mind, a major characteristic of "being smart" is "being interested in figuring things out", and another is "being able to look at things in different and creative ways." So this sort of puzzle creation and puzzle solving is EXACTLY what I think "being smart" is all about.

And I can remember being interested in this sort of thing; and I can remember even being, well, OKAY at it -- I've never been GOOD at it. But in this case, I look at the thing, start with the first part, and get bored before I even get to the twist. Sometimes I kind of get a vague sense of what sort of thing the twist might be, but I just can't work up the enthusiasm to follow through.

So, in effect, I'm significantly dumber than I used to be.

This is an effect of my bipolar II depression. I have a lack of desire and lack of ability to maintain mental effort to the level that is required to solve problems.

Comments

[navrins]

If it makes you feel any better, none of them inspired me enough to want to take a stab at them. I mean, okay, I've got mild depression issues too (and haven't had breakfast), but I'd be reluctant to conclude anything about your depression or intelligence based on this. Maybe you just don't like that kind of puzzle as much as you imagine someone like you would - and that's totally fine.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

No, this is a general thing -- I don't do puzzles, and once upon a time, I did. It's not these specifically -- I actually printed two of them out and started them, and THEN got bored/confused.

[snippy]

This is helpful, thanks.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

I'd be a little hesitant to benchmark yourself against those puzzles.

For some context, I solve puzzles a lot, and my team tends to come in nearish the top in events of this sort, so we expect we know a bit about it.

The CISRA puzzles (all of the ones linked there) have a common tendency to leaps near the middle of the puzzle, requiring some large jump of logic or intuition to go further. In my team's parlance, we talk about them as having multiple "A-ha"s. And, well, A-has are neat, but they're not a particularly predictable kind of reasoning; they're "look at this thing until you see it in the way the designer did." I was personally stymied by many of the puzzles on that page when I tried them.

That said, I think you're right about depression. One of the things it takes to solve a puzzle is a sort of self-driven urge to push through the layers of obfuscation to the stuff beneath it. In particular, it involves failing on some approaches while you look for the right tactic. When I'm in a depressive episode, those are the first things I lose; the first failure is hard to surmount, and I stop there.

If you did want to try another puzzle, by the way, I recommend the ones from DASH. The event is meant to be accessible to people doing this for the first time, and the puzzles are generally more tractable as a result. Also, their web site includes the hints they gave during the event, which can provide a middle ground between "I can't go on without assistance" and "I need to give up and read the solution." I found the Star Trek puzzle from DASH 2 particularly elegant; it hints everything it's doing reasonably well.

Also, there's a reason we generally do this in teams. Even without depression, maintaining the kind of motivation it takes to bash your head against a puzzle is really hard. I know some of my friends solo it, and I respect the hell out of them for it - but I think puzzles are a game best played with a small group of friends, who can help you come up with different approaches, and be your surrogate motivation when your internal drive is giving up. (As a side effect, a team that works well together can help to support each other's emotions; it's tremendously validating to have three other people to say "you're not stupid; this is just very hard.")

Anyway, that's a long ramble on this. I've been sitting at the intersection of puzzles and occasional depression for a while, so a lot of this is very familiar to me.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Lis and I got pretty far on the Puzzle Fun Placemat -- we've extracted a single extra letter from most of the puzzles, but can't figure out how to extract an extra letter from the maze or from the fill-in-the-colors, if you happen to have any ideas. . .

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

Hint request acknowledged.

Please hold while I take a look at the puzzle, since it's been a few years and I don't want to trust my memory of how it worked. =)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is from the Irregular Webcomic, not the DASH.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

The second hint that CISRA gave for this puzzle might be applicable. Let me know if this unblocks you:
"If you spot any errors in our fun puzzles, letters know and you can win a free meal! We're not just hosing around!"

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Oh, we got that part. We've got the word search, connect-the-dots, the crossword, and the jumble. We're stuck on the maze and the coloring in.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

OK. =)

Can you briefly describe to me how you got the solutions for the four sub-puzzles you've solved?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Solved them and looked at what was left over. But what was left over in each case was a letter. What's wrong in the coloring one is the numbers 2, 2, and 4 in the lower right corner, and what's wrong in the maze is that it's unsolvable. But there are no letters in them.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

This is an inelegant point with this puzzle. I'll suggest you think in a slightly different way about it: each of the puzzles you've solved so far had an error that kept it from being solvable; you corrected that error with a letter. Could you correct the two remaining puzzles to be solvable, and use a letter in doing so?

(I'll note, editorially, that I don't think this is adequately hinted in the puzzle, and that my team stalled out at this same spot, for the same reason; we were looking for a leftover letter in each puzzle.)

[destinygetbored.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way!! I use to do these brain excerises all the time in high school & my friends would just "Huh? Weirdo.." & now I look at them & its just like "Where is this thing going!?" I feel like I use to be smarter too!