Hitting the Intellectual Wall

Athletes have their 'Wall': a psychological and physiological barrier that requires considerable effort to break through. Not being a particularly sporty type, I had not really thought that it might apply to other endeavours. But the recent emergence of a pattern (I'm definitely an 'emerging pattern' type of person - which is an interesting subject all to itself!) that I'd sort of glossed over made me realise that the concept might apply to a much wider scope than I'd thought.

The trigger was something I dabble with in rare idle moments: Sudoku. I was first introduced to it at a Wedding reception where they handed out sheets of brain teasers to occupy the guests whilst all the wedding reception stuff was being prepared, and there were two Sudoku taken from a broadsheet newspaper. Never having seen them before I solved them and thought that they were quite diverting. Since then I've got one of those electronic ones (naturally), and another one that has possibly the worst cursor-moving device ever perpetrated on human-kind, and several computer, iPod and iPhone versions.

The problem is, there's a sub-set of Sudoku problems that I can't solve. I reach a position where all of the remaining squares can be filled by one of a pair of numbers, and I can't figure out a way of proceeding past this block. I've reached my own 'Wall'. I've spent quite a while analysing the ones that I can't do to try and see if there's something I'm missing, but I haven't found it yet. Here's one:


Whilst I was racking my brain trying to solve it, I remembered a past situation with a close resonance to this one: when I tried to learn the 'Lisp' programming language. Now every other programming language I've learnt involved an initial feeling of being overwhelmed by the arcane difference between the newcomer and what I already knew, but eventually this was replaced with a moment of inspiration where 'I got it' and then things went as smoothly as learning a new language ever goes. This was how it was for Fortan, Basic, C, 68000 assembler, Pascal, HTML and Prolog...

But Lisp was different. Big Time different. 'You aren't going to like this' different. I unexpectedly hit the Wall and could not get past. And did I try! There was something there that just didn't compute. Just like this sub-set of Sudoku problems. Now I'm not saying that this isn't solvable, merely that I can't figure it out. Quite humbling, really.

So in my case, my own personal Wall is very tangible. Maybe I just need to keep metaphorically running, but it is certainly fascinating to see one close up and personal.