If I'm trying to solve a puzzle and I accidentally find out the answer through some sort of cheating means (e.g. somebody spoils it for me), it's quite common for me to continue working on the problem and try to convince myself that I would have got there on my own. So I might, for example, ignore what I now know the answer to be and continue to grind through the step-by-step solution process regardless, to make sure it does come out to the answer it's supposed to.

This all seems reasonable enough given the premise that a major purpose of solving puzzles is to prove to myself that I can, and that doesn't seem to be an unreasonable premise. So far, no surprises.

Yesterday I did surprise myself. I had a small problem at work (some piece of code wasn't working as expected and I couldn't figure out how we hadn't noticed before); after staring fruitlessly at the screen for a while I decided to take a break and go and refill my water glass. In the process of doing that I had a sudden ‘aha!’ insight and instantly knew exactly what the problem was.

That by itself isn't uncommon either; but what was odd was that I then found myself, pretty much instinctively, doing the thing I describe in my first paragraph: trying to convince myself that if I hadn't had that insight, I would still have been able to get to the solution by step-by-step means. It's as if I subconsciously consider sudden flashes of intuition to be cheating in some sense. Which is weird, because flashes of intuition come from my own brain, so it's hardly as if they constitute being given the answer by somebody else!

I suppose it might be that I didn't feel that I'd worked for the answer, and hence didn't feel I deserved credit for finding it. Or perhaps it was that I was worried that next time the insight might not materialise and I'd want to be confident that my step-by-step debugging process was adequate to compensate for its absence (which is admittedly a potentially valid concern).

Or perhaps I'm just slightly weird. Yes, that seems far more likely.

Occasionally something diary-worthy happens to me which never quite gets written down in here, because it happened so gradually that there was no point at which I could look back and decide it was obviously over and hence able to be written about coherently. Earlier this week, a conversation at post-pizza reminded me of just such an incident from the year before last, so I'll write it up now on the basis that it's better late than never.

( four-colouring algorithms; geeky as hell )