Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.

Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.

Comments on Puzzles with no insight required

Parent

Puzzles with no insight required

−0

I'm going to post some puzzles as a test of a category of puzzle that does not require finding an insight, but just following steps. If solving a puzzle that requires an insight is like painting, the type proposed here would be like colouring in, or painting by numbers. I can imagine there being some demand for such puzzles, but I can also imagine them being frustrating to people seeking the challenge of finding an insight, so they would need to be clearly labelled to avoid wasting anyone's time.

In this Meta post I'm seeking answers to 2 questions:

Would you like to see this kind of puzzle in this community? This is not about whether you personally would be likely to post or solve such puzzles, but whether you think they should be on topic here.
If we allow such puzzles, what name should their tag have, so that they are easily distinguishable from puzzles that require insight?

I'm not sure if it's possible to draw a clear line between puzzles that require insight and puzzles that do not, so I'm posting extreme examples which definitely require no insight, to start a discussion about whether they are welcome and whether they can be separated.

Examples

These give an idea of what I'm trying to describe. Please suggest any improvements to how this category of puzzles should be described, or any reasons it should be more than one category of puzzles.

discussion puzzles scope

posted 2 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

2mo ago

trichoplax‭

57 348 87

Raw

Markdown

History

0 comment threads

Post

−0

If a problem can be solved simply by following a set of given directions, then it's not a puzzle. Therefore, such non-puzzles don't belong on the Puzzles site.

posted 2 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Olin Lathrop‭

48 111 26

Copy Link

Raw

Markdown

History

1 comment thread

I'm not happy with my description (1 comment)

trichoplax‭ wrote 2 months ago

copy link

I'll add some example challenges to see if it helps narrow down what I'm thinking of. I'll also try to think of a better way of wording the Meta question.

I don't mean that the steps to solve the puzzle are necessarily provided in the puzzle, but that solving the puzzle doesn't require being inventive or insightful, just methodically working through it.

An example that some people would regard as a puzzle is a wordsearch. That could possibly be argued to benefit from insight because the search can be sped up by looking for the least common letters first. I'll try to post example challenges that don't have that kind of speed up (not because I want to see them, but because they are the extreme end of this scale, to help with deciding where to draw the line of what's on topic).