The Importance of Limitations for Creativity and Learning (2023) | Hacker News Reader

The Importance of Limitations for Creativity and Learning (2023)

ratfactor.com

120 pointsandsoitis40 comments

I remember one pivotal moment in college being when I was given an assignment, and I asked if some of the restrictions on the task could be removed. The teacher told me what I really did was just ask for the hard version of the problem.

I asked her what she meant, and instead of telling me, she just laughed and said go ahead, remove the restrictions and see for myself.

She was right! Without the restrictions there were so many more possibilities I had to work much harder to complete the assignment. It was still fun though and I learned more than just the assignment from that lesson.

This is a very frequent experience for me when I think about writing any computer program. Passed all my algorithms and data structures with flying colours. Did some projects that were easy to start back when I knew fewer languages. Did some projects that had to be done in certain platforms for compatibility with existing software. Now new projects are hard to start. Maybe I should learn to use AI to transliterate programs and it wouldn't feel like it mattered as much?

And now I'm in the real world where you can do almost anything. It's not just software platforms that are the problem. Should I apply for jobs? Definitely. Which jobs? And what about the other paths? Should I also write some SaaS and hope I get acquihired? Which one? In which platform? Should I learn how government contracts work? Probably can't get one as an individual, but should I learn about them anyway? Should I pay the fees to found a company, even though it's just me and doesn't have a business plan, to look more legitimate to potential customers for the thing I don't even know yet?

I never thought about this and now I see that I had all these questions too. Thanks for making that clear.

> And now I'm in the real world where you can do almost anything. It's not just software platforms that are the problem. Should I apply for jobs? Definitely. Which jobs? And what about the other paths? Should I also write some SaaS and hope I get acquihired? Which one? In which platform? Should I learn how government contracts work? Probably can't get one as an individual, but should I learn about them anyway? Should I pay the fees to found a company, even though it's just me and doesn't have a business plan, to look more legitimate to potential customers for the thing I don't even know yet?

Check out the book Algorithms to Live By.

How does that solve most of the problems they raised

I also have the same 'welcome to the real world' feeling. I would say I've been bumbling along for 15 years, but recently I've discovered the joys of hiring others. I watched a YT video that was like give yourself time back by buying help before you think you're ready.

Now I try to spend most of my time doing things more unique to me that I can't hire another person to do. It's still a moving target though, I'm going to check out that book another comment recommended.

Are you able to share what the assignment was?

Yes, it was "Design a 6 sided drinking glass", and I wanted the 6 sided limitation removed.

Then in this class design means draw 6-10 preliminary sketches and choose one, then draw and paint 3 perspectives and a 3D view.

One of the most beautiful improvised Jazz pieces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K%C3%B6ln_Concert) was largely produced due to having to play within the limitations of the piano, which was mistakenly set up and was too late to replace.

The first time I heard this recording I basically got stuck in a loop of listening to it on repeat for a couple of weeks. I just couldn’t comprehend that this was improvised.

I'm not sure this is a useful example.

Jarrett recorded dozens of other solo piano improvisations on pianos that posed no issues for his performance, and he himself thought more highly of some of them (e.g. Vienna) than Köln.

So unless you're making the case the the actual popularity of the Köln concert was somehow a function of the less than ideal instrument, I don't see what this shows.

"Art from Adversity" is the idiom that comes to mind. You can poke around and watch the principle in action, particularly in the art of cinema.

Many lesser directors often end up with "lightning in a bottle" -- aka a film that far exceeds their normal ability -- because the common stress of the experience on direction, on production, on the talent made for a synthesis better than sum of its parts.

It doesn't always work that way, but when it does it's very striking.

This is why I like sports, or more specifically "walled" games.

The "walls" are the rules and the task is to figure out how to succeed within those rules. Succeed is up to perspective in many instances.

This encourages creativity. It's why I love baseball, cuz the rules are constantly evolving as people game them. It's so joyful seeing people exploit the rules they agreed to play by.

Limits force us to think INSIDE the box. It's a lot of fun.

Communal boredom is also very important. Being bored with friends is an amazing launching pad for new ideas and thinking.

Are there any games that are not “walled” games?

> Are there any games that are not “walled” games?

Some games approximate infinite play: Minecraft, Roblox, EVE Online, Second Life, Gary's Mode.

However, even they have technological, economic, and rule-based boundaries.

Those are simulations, not games, I would say. Even though they host games inside them.

dotA2. I love to death what you can do within each hero and itemization and strategic layer. Highest mmr players constantly figuring out little tricks and builds and ways to eek out an advantage or find new strats as each patch’s meta develops

Brings https://web.archive.org/web/20260418203923/http://gamestudie... to mind.

Fun to see a write up about game studies. Takes me back :)

It took me years of discipline and control to finally be able to read a book in services like O'Reilly books from cover to cover.

Now, compare it with my own situation living in a medium mountain city in Brazil. Whenever I wanted to read a book published in the US, I had to go to a physical book shop in a major city at least some 100 miles from my city, and pay for each book, at least twice (probably more) that now I pay a month for o'Reilly.

Of course I would read each book cover to cover, and come back to it multiple times, until I had to start doing things like taping the cover back to the book.

"I think Scratch is so featureful that it is intimidating to newcomers. The paradox of having so many toys is that it’s hard to know which one to play with."

I'm the exact opposite. I want the choices and possibilities so that I can run with them. When the space is limited, it can still be fun and interesting, but only until you've plumbed the depths and everything you do becomes derivative, repetitive, and boring.

Growing up, my favorite toy was a huge bucket filled with random lego pieces. Some were basic bricks, some were from the technical set, some were from themed sets (cars, space ships, etc). I'd spend hours coming up with new designs, the original box designs long forgotten.

I had similar thoughts recently, and wrote a somewhat related blog post: https://acbart.github.io/2026/08/23/limited-environments/

> I think the lack of limits in the form of structure is what makes people’s dreams (generally) so boring to hear about - there’s no limits and no structure and no rules. It’s just seemingly-random events.

I wonder why our own dreams are so fascinating, then.

I don't think other people's dreams are boring. I think there is a cultural bias against dreams and their interpretation that it has become almost a trope to be dismissive of them.

One simple thing that I find satisfying is when I'm trying to repair something, and don't have some proprietary special tool that is normally required, but I find a way around it by either using other tools in nonstandard ways or fabricating or modifying a tool to do it. You run into this often if you work on modern cars (or even some older ones). Thinking creatively and finding another solution is fun (though it's also frustrating when you can't).

The article hits the nail in the head. This is also the reason why making games for classic consoles/computers was so enticing. You could not just use any image: it had to be pixel art with tile and palette restrictions, and there was joy in getting more juice out of the same machine. And the same happened with music, RAM, CPU, etc.

And that same joy is the reason why today people (myself included) have created fantasy consoles to make games enforcing similar restrictions.

I feel like it applies to becoming an adult as well: you get less constrained, too many options in almost every decision you have to make, so it's easy to stop bothering and go with the flow

i often observe, "the constraint is the technique."

there isn't much to add to it other than the slight refinement that constraints yield technique. it's similar to relating to rules as tools and not merely limits or constraints. it's an orientation.

The Obstacle is the Tool

Will LLMs cause ‘blank page syndrome’ in its users once the honeymoon period is over and they have generated all the low-hanging slop?

“I’m staring at my agent’s prompt, I can ask it to do anything I wish, anything at all, yet nothing comes to mind…”

I like that. I always start by making a plan with as little budget as possible and only increase the budget if its absolutely increases value.

The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract --Let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherche movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis. The constructive or combining power, by which ingenuity is usually manifested, and to which the phrenologists (I believe erroneously) have assigned a separate organ, supposing it a primitive faculty, has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation among writers on morals. Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

-- "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe

Now apply the above to "complex" (eg. C++/Rust/etc.) vs. "simple" (eg. C/Scheme/etc.) languages. Note also the different mental modes between "constructing a program" (i.e. synthesis) vs. "debugging a program" (i.e. analysis).

The overall mental model/framework must be "simple" while its components (layered and treated as black-boxes) can be complex at a different layer (eg. DSLs) to which another simple model can be applied recursively. It is useless to focus on individual language features while it is all important to construct the larger paradigm/pattern/usage into which those same features can be grouped and thought of as a single unit. Always employ top-down and stepwise-refinement in thinking.

The interesting part is what happens at the edges: retries, partial failures and stale state.

Seems like someone just read https://davidepstein.com/inside-the-box/

That book is so good it inspired a blog post three years before it was published!

Touché

If we assume resources are infinite, any effort would look ridiculous. To achieve great goal, we have to limit ourselves deliberately on some aspects. It reminds me that "compression is intelligence". By limiting the parameter space, the LLM could extract deep representation from training data.

Give a youngster a Lego set and he loves it.

Give them a huge bin of Lego pieces gathered from many sets, all sorted by color and type, and…

They don’t know what to do with it.

That is ridiculous.

If by "Lego set" you mean a pre-determined object that is decomposed into LEGO style blocks, and must be assembled in only one form, in order to match the photo on the box, that is some kind of modern perversion of the Spirit of LEGO.

When I was a small child, we had several kinds of kits. My neighbor had the ultimate nerd's Erector Set type building materials.

I had a set for very small children, called "Bristle Blocks". These were various plastic shapes that locked together with plastic bristles on the end. They also included rolling wheels. They were very versatile, and we could build all kinds of things, my sister and I. We had a big pile of randomly-shaped Bristle Blocks that we stored in a duffel bag.

We also had, courtesy of my grandmother, a very old set of non-LEGO. It was a house model, that was composed of the same type of blocks, and they all had specific uses and placements. It was fun to build, tear down, and rebuild, and yeah, they could be composed into different shapes if you really wanted, but the goal was to reproduce the house.

We also had Lincoln Logs. These were 100% wood, and they notched together like a real-life log cabin would. And they also included green-colored slats for the roof. There were no pre-made patterns, and so you could just build the logs in whatever shapes, but they were obviously designed for houses, and cabins, and other building-shaped things.

These were all really fun, and exercised our creativity. I have no idea why a child would "not know what to do" with a huge bin of random LEGO pieces. I believe that the vast majority of kids would find a way to make them work together. LEGOs were built because of their interchangeability.

By the same token, we also had a lot of Star Wars official merch. And some of those vehicles had many fiddly parts that you could take apart, and put back together. And admittedly, I treated some like LEGO, and I would unscrew all their panels and disassemble them completely, to see how they worked.

I was not as adept at reassembling them, and so my father tended to get pissed when I ruined a very expensive Star Wars vehicle through my curiosity. But at least it wasn't one of his radio sets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com