Monday, February 06, 2006

Japanese for "This game is so addictive!!"

It's kind of humbling when Sudoku tells you that you're below average and 100% of the people who have played this game before are better than you. It's a good reality check, keeps the old ego under control. The last time I played, I thought I had made vast improvements. I cut about 20 minutes off my score. Unfortunately, that still left me worse than about 95% of other players at the medium level. Baby steps, baby steps. You actually kind of have to be a little schizophrenic to succeed at this game. I mean this with all due respect to those who really do have schizophrenia. I'm mainly referring to that scene in A Beautiful Mind, where Nash is looking at the wall of numbers and some of the numbers start to glow or move or flash and everything starts "making sense" for him. Same with this. You sort of have to let your eyes go and just look for patterns and weird groupings of numbers, and when you've been playing for long enough (as I clearly have), you just sort of know that a number goes in a cell, but don't really know why. I think that's what we in psychology call "implicit memory".

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