Results of my puzzle poll

[rhu]

What I noticed about the responses to my puzzle poll the other day was this: Aside from the cultural conditioning that "puzzle people" were looking for a simple answer (which could have been "yes" or "correct"), what I think was the biggest divide was what people did with the extra letters.

For the most part, "non-puzzle people" either assumed the letters were noise or, having tried one or two ways to interpret them and not succeeding, concluded that they were noise. "Puzzle people", on the other hand, might have chosen not to bother decoding them, but they recognized that it would have been inelegant to have letters that clustered towards the beginning of the alphabet without having those letters mean something.

Had I a larger population, I might have tried other mechanisms of answer extraction -- QCQAN YQOQU EXTQRQACT, for example -- to try and see where the tipping point is.

But I got the answer that I was looking for. What I was trying to poke at is a pair of concepts: that I've tentatively dubbed "free will" and "false entropy."

"Free will" is where the puzzle constructor has omitted information that is necessary to solve the puzzle. You're on your own. Of course, exercising your free will in certain directions will reward you, and in other directions it will damn you (until you repent :-). A sudoko has no free will. A variety cryptic has some. An MIT Hunt meta has a lot. The question is, how much free will can a constructor give you before you go off the rails; that of course depends on the solver's experience and imagination, among other things. To me, puzzles with a lot of "free will" are among the most exhilarating to solve.

"False entropy" is the counterforce to "free will." The constructor has given you data that appears random, but isn't. How do you recognize that this is signal, not noise, and how does that help you crack it?

I'm trying to explore these ideas for a few reasons. Foremost is that when I construct puzzles I'd like to understand the mental processes of solvers other than myself, including figuring out how to make these kinds of puzzles fun for people who don't usually do them. Is it just a question of exposure and acculturation, or is there actually a different set of thought processes going on? And if so, can I (or anyone) create a puzzle that's accessible to the people who need an extra nudge without tipping our hands to the puzzleheads?

Another aspect of this that I'm trying to understand and quantify is that I think we're living through a transitional period in puzzlemaking. Much as a composer living in the second half of the eighteenth century had great opportunities and great risks, I think we're living through an explosion of puzzle types, tropes, and tricks. Computers and the internet make possible much more elaborate puzzles than the ones we grew up with, but in twenty years will we have exhausted the realm of never-before-seen types? These "free will" puzzles, I think, are what's pushing the envelope, but how far can the envelope be pushed before we leave the Bach/Mozart transition and end up with Schoenberg, accessible only to highly trained acolytes?

So in my little sample, I didn't say that the extra letters were meaningful. Many of you noticed that they clustered in the first few letters of the alphabet. Trying to interpret them as musical notes was a clever idea that several of you hit on; it just happened to be wrong. But it was exactly the kind of free will solving that I was wondering if we'd see among people who are not experienced puzzlers.

I found it fascinating how many of the non-puzzlers posted that they had initially assumed that there was false entropy but, having failed to crack the code, most then decided that it was true entropy after all, and fell back to the surface answer, instead of declaring "I'm giving up, but the answer's still probably hidden in those letters".

These are my preliminary observations. If you disagree with them, or if you want to poke at this further, let's continue the conversation in the comments.

Thanks to everyone who participated; I hope you found this exploration of our minds as illuminating as I did. And my apologies to those of you who had to sit through a LiveJournal ad. I'm going to move this blog soon, I think.

Comments

Thoughts from a non-puzzle person

[euphud.livejournal.com]

All of what you said is probably correct, but from my perspective, it is all about motivation and trade-off. I like to stretch my mind in many ways, but I don't typically enjoy puzzles like this. If my anticipated frustration outweighs the anticipated payoff, I'm more likely to go on to something more appealing even if I know there is probably a deeper answer.

This isn't to say I don't consider myself a curious person, nor that I am not capable of figuring out the answer.

As for "free will," I love sudoko and am a real fan of jigsaw puzzles. They appeal to me in ways that puzzles like this just don't.

If I have time, I'll try to find some more info in the cog science lit on this.

Cheers-

Shawn

Re: Thoughts from a non-puzzle person

[jadelennox]

I would agree with this, although by that definition 530nm330hz uses above I guess I would count not as a non-puzzle person, but as a lazy puzzle person. But for me, I don't get any trade-off inherent in the puzzle; the trade-off has to be in something external to the puzzle (thus the framework of the mystery Hunt is a perfectly valid trade-off).

That being said, 530nm330hz I like the idea of figuring out some way of crossing the divide between ppuzzlers who are used to free will, and those who are not. (I don't think you can do anything about the divide between puzzlers who actively like free will, and those who don't. Except by providing more trade-offs external to the puzzle, I suppose.)

[canadianpuzzler.livejournal.com]

Your experimentation in this regard has been very timely, I must admit, as I'm planning to do a small experiment in bridging the non-puzzler/hunt-puzzler divide with my friends in a couple weeks. (If I can find the time and energy to figure out the logistics for doing so in addition to everything else that's happening in my life, possibly staging a version of same at the NPL convention, but I digress.)

I'll try to remember to report back on how it works out. Feel free to nudge me if I forget.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Move? To where?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Dreamwidth, at least for now. Probably self-host on Movable Type later this summer.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Not familiar with either, but I hope there'll be an RSS feed so we can still keep up.