When I face a problem that I don’t understand, my thoughts become very unclear and I start trying to make sense to the pieces of the problem.

In that process, some pieces may be quite clear from the beginning. I suppose that is because they have similarities with previously learned concepts. But there are a lot of gaps between those. While trying to fit those pieces I enter in a quite abstract way of thinking. The closest way I found to describe it is that: I try to identify the concepts and discover the relationships between them. Because I don’t know if it has a name, I’m going to call it “discovery” mode.

My experience in that “discovery” mode is that it is very unfocused. I can fall out of the main area pretty easily and move to discover other related pieces that are irrelevant to the problem.

I found out that pairing in understanding a problem, makes my “discovery” mode not lose track that easily. It becomes more focused because there is always the need to communicate the discoveries you are making and to learn what the pair has discovered.

Also, because I have to communicate what I’m thinking, any inconsistencies can be captured by myself or the pair at that moment. If the discoveries seem correct, that communication reinforces them.

Why am I writing about this? Today, Chris Jordan asked me to pair with him to understand better the mastermind game and the negamax approach to implement the AI algorithm that solves the mastermind “secret code”. Neither of us knew how to do it.

We started by looking at a description of the algorithm but, like most of those descriptions, it was too academic and abstract. That made it confusing. So we started bouncing the pieces we were extracting of that. And then we tried to understand them. We had to put examples to communicate with each other. Those examples were incomplete – like our understanding. But they were good enough to enter in the “discovery” mode. When someone discovered (understood) some part, he explained to the pair in a simple enough way for him to understand.

That way we learnt faster that any of us would separately.