I have been thinking about how games and puzzles can help teach concepts and strengthen a person’s thought patterns for specific types of problem solving. However, there are literally thousands of games available across a multitude of forms, whether they are card, board, or computer-based games. The large number of options can make it challenging to even know when one might be particularly well suited to helping you train your mind for a type of design project. Discussion forums, like this one can collect lessons learned and make you aware of games or puzzles that others have found useful in exercising their minds – as well as being entertaining.

I have a handful of games that I could suggest, but I will start by offering only one recommendation in the hopes that other people will share their finds and thoughts about when and why the recommendation would be worthwhile to someone else.

For anyone that needs to do deep thinking while taking into account a wide range of conditions from a system perspective, I recommend checking out the ancient game of Go. It is a perfect knowledge game played between two players, and it has a ranking or handicap system that makes it possible for two players that are of slightly different strengths to play a challenging game for both players. Rather than explaining the specifics of the game here, I would instead like to focus on what the game forces you to do in order to play competently.

The rules are very simple – each player alternates turns placing a stone on a grid board. The goal of the game is to surround and capture the most territory. The grid is of sufficient size (19×19 points) that your moves have both a short term and a long term impact. Understanding the subtlety and depth of the long term impact of your moves grows in richness with experience and practice – not unlike designing a system in such a way as to avoid shooting yourself in the foot during troubleshooting. If you are too cautious, your opponent will capture too much of the board for your excellent long term planning to matter. If you play too aggressively – such as to capture as much territory as directly or as quickly as possible, you risk trying to defend what you have laid a claim to with a structure that is too weak to withstand any stress from your opponent.

The more I play Go, the easier I am able to see how the relationships between decisions and trade-offs affect how well the game – or a project – will turn out. Being able to find an adequate balance between building a strong structure and progressing forward at an appropriate pace is a constant exercise in being able to read your environment and adjusting to changing conditions.

I would recommend Go to anyone that needs to consider the system level impacts of their design decisions. Do you have a game you would recommend for embedded developers? If so, what is it and why might an embedded developer be interested in trying it out?

How are Christmas and Halloween the same? The intended answer to this question requires you to look at the question from different angles to find the significant relationship between these seemingly unrelated events. In fact, to be a competent problem solver, you often need to be able to look at a problem from multiple angles and find a way to take advantage of a relationship between different parts of the problem that might not be immediately obvious. If the relationship was obvious, there might not be a problem to solve.

I have found over the years that doing different types of puzzles and thinking games often help me to juggle the conditions of a problem around and find that elusive relationship that makes the problem solvable. While I do not believe being able to solve Sudoku puzzles will make you smarter, I do believe that practicing Sudoku puzzle in different ways can help exercise your “cognitive muscles” so that you can more easily reorganize difficult and abstract concepts around in your mind and find the critical relationship between the different parts.

There are several approaches to solving Sudoku puzzles and each requires a different set of cognitive wiring to perform competently. One approach, and one that I see most electronic versions of the puzzle support, involves penciling in all of the possible valid numbers in each square and using a set of rules to eliminate numbers from each square until there is one valid answer. Another approach finds the valid numbers without using the relationships between the “penciled” numbers. Each approach exercises my thought process in very different ways, and I find that switching between them provides a benefit when I am working on a tough problem.

I believe being able to switch gears and represent data in equivalent but different representations is a key skill to effective problem solving. In the case of Christmas and Halloween, rather than looking at the social context associated with each day, looking at the date of each day – October 31 and December 25 can suggest a non-obvious relationship.

I find that many of the best types of puzzles or games for exercising orthogonal thinking engage a visual mode of looking at the problem. The ancient board game of Go is an excellent example. The more I play Go, the more abstract relationships I am able to recognize and most surprisingly – apply to life and problem solving. If you have never played Go, I strongly recommend.

Another game I find a lot of value for exercising orthogonal thinking is Contract Bridge – mostly because it is a game that involves incomplete information – much like real life problems – and relies on the ability of the players to communicate information with each other within a highly constricted vocabulary. Often times, the toughest design problems are tough precisely because it is difficult to verbalize or describe what the problem actually is.

As for the relationship between October 31 and December 25, it is interesting that the abbreviations for these two dates also correspond to notation of the same exact number in two different number bases – Oct(al) 31 is the same value as Dec(imal) 25.

These examples are some of the ways I exercise my orthogonal thinking. What are your favorite ways to stretch your mind and practice switching gears on the same problem?