When my son was creating his role-playing computer game, Homesick, I helped him develop puzzles to be solved in the game. First, it's quite challenging to create puzzles that will have no explanations or clues, so that part of the problem is to make sure they are recognized as puzzles to be solved. Second, the puzzles need to be solvable in some reasonable amount of time (you don't want your player stuck for hours and hours) and yet be challenging and not susceptible to solution by just trying everything. After the game was published I was surprised by the range of feedback on the puzzles: from "impossible" to "too easy". Of course his is not the only computer game incorporating puzzles, so there are a lot of them out there. I'm not a game player, but it would be interesting to catalogue and categorize the different game puzzles. Brent On 8/12/2019 8:12 AM, Cris Moore via math-fun wrote:
Hi Scott. I would love to hear your thoughts on how to design puzzles. An intern of mine designed a wooden puzzle this Summer, and she was hoping to find readings about the art of puzzle design. In particular, we felt that “hard” and “tricky” are different things, that some puzzle designs are deceptive and others are not, and that a “good” puzzle involves some interesting balance of these things.
- Cris
On Aug 12, 2019, at 8:43 AM, Scott Kim <scott@scottkim.com> wrote:
Good question. Here's why I think mathematicians don't write about the process of doing math more often.
*1. Lack of motivation. *The simple reason is that there is no driving need to explain mathematical research to people not doing it. That might be wrong however; anyone seeking funding for research needs to explain the importance of their work to outsiders. In science there are two drivers for visualizing scientific data: allowing researchers to discover/confirm patterns, and explaining their work to funders, which result in two very different types of research. You would think that training young mathematicians would be a good motivation to write about how math is done; it's why Keith Devlin wrote Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. But there's a vicious circle at work here — the people who enter math tend to be the ones who already get it.
*2. Lack of skill. *Mathematicians are of course not trained to be writers/teachers. In addition, the common practice among mathematicians of hiding messiness and only reporting polished results interferes with writing to outsiders. I see similar biases in other fields shaped by the values of the field itself — artists speak through images, so are distrustful of artists who write about art, while writers, who practice exposing internal mental processes, can be quite articulate talking about their craft.
*3. Lack of support*. A common attitude in academia is to look down on "popularization" of mathematics, though in this group that is probably not the rule. Marcus du Sautoy is a professor for the public understanding of math — what is remarkable here is not his position, but the fact that it is so incredibly rare. And on the flip side is that many science journalists who write about math for the public often don't understand math deeply enough (fortunately many do).
*4. Resistance in the audience. *Institutionalized misunderstanding in the general public about what mathematics is, perpetuated by math education that perpetuates the myth that mathematics is no deeper than mindless calculation techniques. That means that any good explanation needs first to overcome misunderstanding.
Personally I find the topic of how math is done to be really interesting, so I am eager to work on it more.
On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 12:03 AM Andres Valloud < avalloud@smalltalk.comcastbiz.net> wrote:
Why do you think this is?
On 8/11/19 20:58 , Scott Kim wrote:
the dearth of mathematicians talking about what mathematics is I find intolerable
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