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Do you guys have any advice on deciding when to map out all possible game boards after reading the conditions (for sequencing games) and when to tackle the questions and make inferences as they come? I've found that my intuition is awful with this - I never know when to map everything out or when I should just go straight to the questions. I usually start by trying to make some inferences and set up alternative game boards but sometimes it works and sometimes I get stuck. Then when I watch JY's explanation videos, he'll sometimes have set up like, 6 different boards for a game I didn't bother doing at all in the beginning, or it'll be the opposite where I've set up a ton of different boards in the beginning (and it's a time killer) and he just went straight to the questions. Any tips would be appreciated!
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Absolutely. Yes. And in fact, I might start doing this in my practice just to check my diagramming intuition from another angle. Great tip on getting unstuck—it can happen to any of us!
I agree with everything said so far, but will just add that if you get really stuck at the outset, it helps to quickly skim the questions to get an idea of what they're asking for. In certain cases you'll see several questions that are just rules based and don't need any boards drawn at all, but other times you'll see ones with several hypotheticals and you can usually use those as a guide to determine whether you can make a few boards or you'll need to just brute force some of them.
I've found that my intuition is awful with this - I never know when to map everything out or when I should just go straight to the questions.
The intuition will come with time and practice—trial and error, missing inferences, making multiple boards when it proves unnecessary, making only one board when splitting would have been very effective, etc. It really just comes with a lot of instances of "oh, I really didn't need to do that" and/or "oh, I should have split that board or done some hypos."
If you've got a rule like "L must go either first or last," then make 2 boards. If you've got something like "If A goes first, B goes third" then make a board for A in 1 and B in 3. That's my typical decision point—is there a rule that either determines with great certainty one or more of the positions, or a conditional that will trigger very concrete results.
I agree with ^
Usually, if the rule says something like..... Take G, H, L, F, A and order them in sequence... and then it says "G will be in either 1 or 5", then I split the game board into G in 1 and G in 5. Sometimes they add another similar rule, and then I would do the same thing..... H is in 3 or 4...
I would then split
G _ H _ _
_ _ H _ G
G _ _ H _
_ _ _ H G
:)
My rule (typically get 0-2 wrong per section) is that I split the board if I have a basic rule that makes no more than 2-4 more boards, based on how complex each individual board is. Also, I split with even more than that if I can tell that each board will be mostly/completely finished. I will sub-split if it doesn't break down to more than 5-6 boards total. Also, I will split if I can tell that some or all of the game boards will be impossible scenarios, which dramatically simplify the problem
My personal opinion is that in most cases splitting takes very little time (like under 30 seconds per board) compared to the huge amount of time it may save you later.