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Puzzle Games (Games) Math Games

Data Mining the Web Reveals What Makes Puzzles Hard For Humans 44



Data Mining the Web Reveals What Makes Puzzles Hard For Humans

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  • Human vs computer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gurps_npc (621217) on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @10:28AM (#46639573) Homepage
    Computers do certain things very very well - in depth repetition, aka recursive.

    People do not do well with recursive. People do well with hidden simple pattern recognition. Give us a simple pattern, and we can recognize it everywhere. The simplest example of this is optical character recognition, i.e. recognizing letters in a picture. In part because there are infinite number of fonts, but humans can recognize them all, because we look for the pattern. Computers have major issues with this - and to get any real accuracy, do it slower than people do.

  • by Wycliffe (116160) on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @11:53AM (#46640475) Homepage

    He's looking at both complexity of the move and how many possible moves there are at each step.
    It is much easier to find a valid move and solve a puzzle if there are 10 opening moves.
    It is much harder if there is only a single path of 20 moves in a particular sequence.
    A puzzle with 20 steps that must be done in order is much much harder than a puzzle with 20
    steps that can be done in any order just like it would be much harder to solve a word search if
    you had to find the words in order.
    This should be pretty accurate as a truly serial puzzle would be the sum of time to solve each
    step while a puzzle with parallel steps would be the average time to discover one of the possible
    next moves. On average if there is more than one solution on a step then finding one of the
    many solutions should be faster than finding the one solution.
