More Apophenia

A few days ago, someone online turned me onto Japanese Sudoku logic puzzles. The objective of a Sudoku puzzle is to fill a big 3-by-3 grid composed of smaller 3-by-3 grids with the numbers 1 through 9. There are no arithmetic operations involved: it is purely an application of basic logic. I'm working on a more intermediate puzzle right now, and while there are still some rather softball moves, getting certain numbers in place requires a leap in logical thinking, something akin to taking two problems and smashing them together to eliminate possibilities from both of them: "If I can only use this coupon on a Friday, but the wind is blowing from the east and there's a cold front coming in from the south, then the man in the black vizard mask must be the king of Bohemia!"

The leaps in logical thinking in doing this rough Sudoku puzzle, whose difficulty is untellingly described as "moderate", reminded me for some reason of Colin Kapp's Patterns of Chaos, a space opera novel that I recall fondly from my youth in which engineers develop a rudimentary means of predicting the future. This leads them to a defeatist attitude since their equipment is, by every definition, never wrong. "If our computers tell us there is going to be an energy burst of a certain size in sector 7 at noon tomorrow, we can only conclude our spaceship of that same exact size is going to blow up there at noon tomorrow. Aw, shucks. And I was going to go play hypergolf this weekend. Oh well, nevermind that, I'd better go die."

Needless to say, the protagonist presents a very different idea about interpreting these findings, and in a way so creative — to an seventh-grader at least — that it made a very distinct impression in my mind. These Sudoku puzzles are making me put 1 and 1 together to get 3, and I have that exact same impression in my mind again. It is energizing to the point of making me want to read Patterns of Chaos again.