Mistakes

Mistakes are fantastic for learning. When you make a mistake, what you learn from it often sticks with you far more strongly than if you hadn’t made the mistake. Whether it’s intrigue, frustration, embarrassment, a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feeling… mistakes makes you feel something, and that helps solidify them in your memory.

This is true in academic subjects like mathematics and sciences, in skills like software development and sport, and in many other aspects of life like social interaction. However, I find it intriguing that the same doesn’t really hold for Skyscrapers, and indeed many other kinds of logic puzzles.

When solving Skyscrapers, we aim to not make mistakes. And in fact when we make a mistake, the usual response is to see if we can identify where the root cause lies, then see if the situation is sufficiently salvageable in that we can backtrack to when we didn’t have a mistake. If not, screw it and restart the puzzle.

But when doing this backtracking, there’s not much we can really learn from the fallout of the mistake. Most of it is just fallacious deductions from an incorrect puzzle state which provides zero value. The root cause is where we have the opportunity for learning. But more often than not, I find it’s just a silly slip-up or oversight on my part.

When you’re starting out this can be helpful, especially if you find you have a tendency for flawed logic. I’ve found this to be quite true when trying out different kinds of puzzles, where it’s helpful to constantly check for errors to highlight any misconceptions I have. However, it’s not long before you reach a level where you’re unlikely to make inaccurate deductions.

Also, if you notice the error late – a lot of the time it’s when you’re on the home straight – it’s really quite difficult to retrace your steps in the right order to find where you first went wrong.

There’s a decently nonzero possibility that I hold this perception due to my relatively low error rate (this is not a flex), resulting in a smaller sample size of their potential effectiveness. And most of the errors I do make are slips more than faults in logic. Trying out other kinds of puzzles has opened my mind a bit more to them, though.