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<<  Saturday, January 04, 2003  >> Clifford Pickover's ESP test A friend pointed me to Clifford Pickover's ESP test. Take a minute and try it before you look at the spoiler1. Although I'm not a great puzzle solver in general, this one was pretty easy for me. I have a theory as to why that's so, and if I'm right, this puzzle will be easily solved by most programmers -- although it seems to have mystified quite a few visitors to Pickover's site. Like a lot of puzzles, the solution to this one requires that you question your assumptions. Programmers, more than most people, do that for a living. In a 1999 column on problem-solving strategies, I wrote: In real life, you never have to stop to consider whether, for example, the failure of gravity to operate as expected is a possible explanation for some problem. In the realm of computers and software, you're dealing with abstractions layered on abstractions, and in order to make progress on the higher-level ones you have to believe in the lower-level ones. But in order to debug things, you have to question all assumptions, at every level, all the time. This is, psychologically, just plain hard. It's still hard, and I still fail to do it as consistently and effectively as I'd like. But I'm working on developing the habit, and I think I'm making some progress. 1 Here's the spoiler.   A conversation with Ray Ozzie Ray Ozzie, founder, chairman, and CEO of Groove Networks, has been a creator and harnesser of disruptive technology since the dawn of the client/server age. In a conversation with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor and Lead Analyst Jon Udell, Ozzie discusses the unique nature of disruptive technologies, the role of collaboration tools in the workplace, and the emerging law of unintended consequences. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

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