2/26/21 A couple days ago, I posted a puzzle from Tim Leonard.
"A ship is twice as old as its boiler was when the ship was as old as the boiler is now. The combined age of the ship and boiler is twenty-eight years. What are their ages?"
Given something like that, I can't just leave it. I have to try. I'm not always successful, but I can't just ignore it. That's just not in me.
When I was about 14, I was given this puzzle:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=hexed+puzzle
Fairly quickly, I discovered that there were multiple solutions, and not long after that, I began recording them. Over the next few years, I recorded about 250 different solutions, not including mirror images, etc. Even today, when I see one, I do it -- although I'm not nearly as fast. When I was programming, I wrote a program to see how many solutions there were. 2339. (Someone had already beaten me to it, but I'd bet mine was faster.)
When I see them on EBAY and they're not expensive, sometimes I buy one. I just bought one for one of Beverly's friends. BUT, what I've noticed is that when other folks try it, most give up. Of those that do solve it, often they consider it done. I've never seen anyone go back and find multiple solutions.
It's interesting. When I was doing it, I was faster than anyone else I've seen. The key there is to recognize early that the pieces you have won't fit into the space you have. (I find it inordinately frustrating to see someone try to fit pieces when it's obvious that they're not going to fit.) You can swap a couple, which works sometimes, but more often than not, you (I, that is) have to remove several pieces, and, quite often, start over. But I'd work on it like it was a compulsion. Somewhere in this house, I still have the 1/10" graph paper, with 250 solutions, organized so that if I was to add a new one, there are key pieces to look at to prevent repeats.
Okay, back to "the ship". I posted it, thinking that some - clearly not all, or even a majority - would think it was worth working on. Nobody did. Clearly it is hard. Took me about an hour, what with misstarts, etc. A day or two later, I went back and worked out 3 equations that would lead to a solution. I doubt that anyone looked at them either, even though they were fairly simple / direct.
I expect that mindset was why I was relatively successful at programming. I'll be 80 this year, and I just don't have whatever it takes to do what I used to. One Friday, I went to work, back in the keypunch days, and worked on a program until Saturday afternoon. I absolutely hated using coding sheets -- I'd much rather sit at a keypunch and have something to show, that I could try to run. I'd never learned to type, but when I started taking night classes at the College of San Mateo, I learned. There were times when I'd be working on a problem, and with another part of my mind, kind of watch myself working. The best times were when I was working in operations, and something was taking an inordinate amount of time to do. I'd look at it, and just know if I could write something to make it better. It would all be in my head before I started. Then, there was a race to see if I could type it before I forgot all the pieces. Most of my programs have no comments at all, because I couldn't afford the time to put them in. Sometimes I went back -- more often than not, I just added something at the beginning about what I was thinking.
The 60s, 70s, and 80s were the good times. There weren't a dozen new languages every few years. When you (I) learned a language, I could keep using it. I liked assembler language (close to machine language). Ya have to do two things at once, keep track of the programming objective, and the instructions that it takes to get there. Relatively few people are particularly good at that -- fortunately for me. I'd been in a pretty dead end job, until I started programming. That said, I worked with several folks who were much better than I was. Thank You Lord.