Like a year ago, I installed this little game on my Android phone :
It's called "Entangled", and the point is to relocate the balls so that in the end no link crosses any other link. It made me think of those relational database diagrams I had to draw in college; with one rectangle for each table, and a link for each foreign key. We, the students, had to organize our diagram so no link would be crossing another, or the teacher would get angry. At that time, this problem already "threw me into perplexion" (I naturally felt like writing that. It doesn't mean anything, I just felt it was legit. Sometimes I write things that seem new to me, then discovering I feel like writing them because they indeed are legit, and I heard them in some movie, or read them in some article. But here no, it just doesn't mean anything). At that time already, this problem left me puzzled (there we are). How could I automate this? I had no idea of the algorithm that would untangle my tables. I was also wondering how to test whether it was actually possible to completely untangle a diagram. In the end, I would only use the good old trials and errors method, but I was feeling dumb, and anxious, as usual.
Here we are, a few years later. I had the brilliant idea to download that nightmare. Those nightmares make me anxious, but I can't get rid of them. I'll come back to them every once in a while. All those things that seemed complex, that I didn't perfectly understand, or didn't understand at all... they haunt me. So, at first, I couldn't solve the levels past the most basic ones. It seemed incredibly complex to me, once again. I was searching for The Criteria. I was in the mindset of a programmer, and consciously searching for an algorithm. What is The Criteria that would make me choose one ball to move? And based on what would I choose the direction in which I'd move it, how would I choose the final location? It was driving me extremely anxious, which mindset, I know from experience, is the worst of all to solve any problem efficiently.
I let it aside for a while. But it kept haunting me. One day, I opened this game again, and I was suddenly able to solve the levels one after the other, easily. What had happened was that I stopped thinking. I looked at the setup, and one ball was standing out, and that ball felt like it was attracted to a different position. So, with my little finger, I dragged the ball to where it was called. Then the focus naturally shifted to another ball that was attracted to another position. Ball after ball, I was finally able to untangle the setup, every one of them. I almost solved all the levels now, and I only stopped because it became boring.
I still don't know what I'm doing. And I try not to think too much about it, lest the anxiety appears again. But I'm pretty sure that I'm now closer than ever to finding the algorithm. Now there is something that I do that solves the problem, and I can try to analyze this thing.
My English in this article feels so bad that I'm not even going to try to fix it. I know why my english became so broken lately. I stopped reading articles in english every morning. Currently, when I'm in the bus, heading toward my workplace, I read books in french. Only books in french. Also, I don't talk to my ex-girlfriend at all anymore...
It's called "Entangled", and the point is to relocate the balls so that in the end no link crosses any other link. It made me think of those relational database diagrams I had to draw in college; with one rectangle for each table, and a link for each foreign key. We, the students, had to organize our diagram so no link would be crossing another, or the teacher would get angry. At that time, this problem already "threw me into perplexion" (I naturally felt like writing that. It doesn't mean anything, I just felt it was legit. Sometimes I write things that seem new to me, then discovering I feel like writing them because they indeed are legit, and I heard them in some movie, or read them in some article. But here no, it just doesn't mean anything). At that time already, this problem left me puzzled (there we are). How could I automate this? I had no idea of the algorithm that would untangle my tables. I was also wondering how to test whether it was actually possible to completely untangle a diagram. In the end, I would only use the good old trials and errors method, but I was feeling dumb, and anxious, as usual.
Here we are, a few years later. I had the brilliant idea to download that nightmare. Those nightmares make me anxious, but I can't get rid of them. I'll come back to them every once in a while. All those things that seemed complex, that I didn't perfectly understand, or didn't understand at all... they haunt me. So, at first, I couldn't solve the levels past the most basic ones. It seemed incredibly complex to me, once again. I was searching for The Criteria. I was in the mindset of a programmer, and consciously searching for an algorithm. What is The Criteria that would make me choose one ball to move? And based on what would I choose the direction in which I'd move it, how would I choose the final location? It was driving me extremely anxious, which mindset, I know from experience, is the worst of all to solve any problem efficiently.
I let it aside for a while. But it kept haunting me. One day, I opened this game again, and I was suddenly able to solve the levels one after the other, easily. What had happened was that I stopped thinking. I looked at the setup, and one ball was standing out, and that ball felt like it was attracted to a different position. So, with my little finger, I dragged the ball to where it was called. Then the focus naturally shifted to another ball that was attracted to another position. Ball after ball, I was finally able to untangle the setup, every one of them. I almost solved all the levels now, and I only stopped because it became boring.
I still don't know what I'm doing. And I try not to think too much about it, lest the anxiety appears again. But I'm pretty sure that I'm now closer than ever to finding the algorithm. Now there is something that I do that solves the problem, and I can try to analyze this thing.
My English in this article feels so bad that I'm not even going to try to fix it. I know why my english became so broken lately. I stopped reading articles in english every morning. Currently, when I'm in the bus, heading toward my workplace, I read books in french. Only books in french. Also, I don't talk to my ex-girlfriend at all anymore...
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