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Comment by yantrams | Hacker News Reader

Taking a break from sitting at the desk and going for a walk and thinking about the problem has worked surprisingly well for me many times. It was something I first read about in a Poincare's article on how Mathematical ideas are generated.

Coming to general methods of problem solving in recreational math, I always look for symmetry and transforming the problem from one problem space to another and induction techniques before attacking it. For a research/modelling problem, my approach is to start working on the most simplified version of it and gradually progress towards the original problem.

There is an excellent numberphile video on Josephus problem that illustrates how examining specific instances to observe patterns can help solve the general case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCsD3ZGzMgE

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I am a developer and almost all the solutions to my software engineering (architectural) problems have occurred to me when I was walking. Even sitting down quietly dosen't work. I have to keep walking.

It has gotten so absurd that I do a lot of walking at my work, usually in an empty conference room and people have many a time wondered if I do any work at all.

But, I love it. The challenge, the walk and the solution is exhilarating to me.

We spend aeons hunting aka problem solving on the walk- i never understood why thinking was supposed to be a thing of motionlessness.

I always suspected its the triumph of some educators deep down in history - who had a preference for a quite audience over one restless challenging the presented ideas.

I believe most work places ought to have large sprawling gardens and beautiful landscaping. It would make me more productive for sure.

I am from India and most offices are in the middle of concrete jungles. Even in IT companies, there are no places to walk around. It's a shame.

Looking at houses in the US, especially rural areas makes my mind orgasm. Such serene places.

Good for you :) - for me, laying down with eyes shut is when I will have attractive solutions to hard problems! Happens sometimes standing in the shower but those all tend to be strategic ones unlike the tactical ones that get solved laying down.

Crazy stuff!

Reminds me of a chapter from the book "Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman" (as far as I remember).

The chapter describes how Feynman came across how his colleague visualizes a task. IIRC Feynman does it visually (imagines something visual in his mind) and thus can do voice related activities while he is thinking, but his colleague does it by visualizing sound (he thinks tick-tock sounds in his mind), so can do visual tasks while he is thinking.

Really fascinating how a human mind works.

Also reminds me of the quote by Einstein, something about judging the ability of a fish to climb a tree.

Everyone has a unique and effective way to navigate the world intellectually.

> Also reminds me of the quote by Einstein, something about judging the ability of a fish to climb a tree.

Almost certainly not by Einstein, for what it's worth. It was probably made up by motivational speaker Matthew Kelly or someone close to him, as the earliest verifiable occurrence of the quotation is in his 2004 book The Rhythm of Life: Living Every Day with Passion and Purpose [1].

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/06/fish-climb/

I wonder if it’s derived from the feminist slogan “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”?

Wow. Thanks for sharing that piece of trivia! Now I get what this song from 1981 - The fish needs a bike by Blurt - was referring to. I always thought it was a reference to some surrealist work or something :)

https://www.discogs.com/Blurt-The-Fish-Needs-A-Bike/release/...

Ohh ok. Great to learn this bit of trivia. Almost everywhere I saw this quote (ahem, reddit) it is almost always associated with Einstein.

I have a heuristic: when a genius is quoted saying something that could've come from a TED talk, they probably didn't say it. Sometimes they said something kind of similar that got "sanded down" by meme evolution.

I tend to use my verbal/language capacity for analyzing problems, which makes it almost impossible for me to converse out loud at the same time.

It is from the other book by Feynman "What do you care what other people think?"

This works well for me too :) Specifically when I am going to sleep. Recently, I spent a couple of days working on "tight paving/tiles" problem from Knuth's Christmas Lecture ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxQw4CdxLr8 ) and surprised myself when I managed to exhaustively enumerate all valid arrangements(around 40 I think) for some small configuration while lying on the bed at night, something that I never thought I could do without a pen and paper.

Most of my hard work is done walking around the block or in a line at starbucks. Sitting at the desk things won't come into focus, and if they did someone would interrupt me.

I wrote a blog post about this.

http://www.iancollmceachern.com/single-post/2016/07/21/Pie-a...

The writers of the Men in Black movies called it "getting pie" and so do I.

You have to make time and space for lightning to strike.

> Taking a break from sitting at the desk and going for a walk

I cannot stress this enough. Being cooped up for long periods of time is very detrimental to tasks that must be carried out “in the head.”

And yet, I was confined to a small room for most of my childhood and I feel I managed to be more creative then than I am now, when I have the freedom to travel the world. I wouldn’t want to go back to staying inside a room most of the time though.

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