A recent visit to my parents found my dad sat in a chair doing soduko puzzles. As he is a man of considerable numeric and mathmatical ability, he had sailed through the “easy” and “moderate” pages, had nearly completed the “difficult” page and was wading his way through the “fiendish” puzzles.
While the whole numbers-in-boxes thing doesn’t really grab me, I do appreciate a good mind-wrestle with a problem. But, unlike soduko, software development generally has more potental solutions than problems. For example:
Problem: We need to store customer details, such as addresses and telephone numbers, and allow the customers to keep these up to date.
Solution: Erm…
OK, bad example. That’s really a whole series of problems, and therefore will require a whole series of solutions that all work together. But it illustrates my point, that writing software often poses more head-scratching moments about which solution is best, rather than if there is a solution at all.
I suppose that is why the whole soduko thing never appealed to me much. After all, if I have a problem why can’t I come up with my own solution, which may be different to anybody elses, rather than being restricted to the One Right Answer.
And yes, I wasn’t good at mathmatics when I was at school.