LOGIC GAME set up

Coolmama09

Hi All. I know JY emphasizes to write small, fast and neat in logic games and NO ERASING. I'm not sure exactly on the actual test sheet what I'm supposed to for sequence question. Seems there there are 2 ways. Have one master diagram and eliminate pieces like you would playing chess in your head to figure out each question. Or draw a fresh diagram for each question along with a new _ _ _ _ _ grid . And he eliminates pieces so essentially is erasing them to pare down and yet we can't erase. I mean I CAN...but he says not to. Can anyone tell me how I should be doing this?

Jonathan Wang

You have your master diagram that you never draw on, and you reproduce it when you need it. It really doesn't take that long to draw a few dashes in a row, and if you have to do it a ton of times in one game (making it take a long time in the aggregate) then you're almost certainly not doing the questions the right way. Brute force is never strictly necessary, and only rarely is the most reasonable/efficient/sanity-preserving way to go about a question. .

You don't have to be able to "play chess in your head" to the completion of the question, but you do need to be able to do a nonzero amount of work in your head in terms of what rules trigger what rules, what you can place in your diagram because it's set in stone vs. what you need to leave floating, keeping track of variables you have yet to use, and so forth. Therein lies the learned skill of sequencing games.

Coolmama09

thank you. that is exactly what i needed to hear.

runiggyrun

@Coolmama09 - For sequencing games the questions usually give you an extra piece of information, so absolutely go ahead and write a miniboard next to the question incorporating this extra piece of information. Most of the time there are a couple of inferences to be made - for instance if you are given a precise placement for a piece that's at the middle of the chain, you now know for sure that the "leaders" of that piece go in the front slots and the "followers" go in the latter slots after that piece.
Most of the time it's not necessary to redraw the tree diagram- I just cover the part of the tree that's been dealt with with my fingers and solve the question using the pared down tree. But if a couple of tricky "branches" fall out, or the tree gets divided in two somewhat complex branches, I might go ahead and write the new tree diagram out. It shouldn't happen more than once or twice in a game, and sometimes those few extra seconds in rewriting the diagrams save you dozens of seconds answering the questions.