The Maze Theory

Last update: 8th, Aug, 2023.

How do you normally approach a deduction?

I don’t mean this as a trick question, or you have to somehow sound smart. It just literally is: “How do you normally approach a deduction?”

For a lot of you, especially beginners, you would approach by going headfirst. Meaning, you see a clue and you try to deduce. A single step deduction.

And it’s nothing bad, it’s fundamental. But today, I’d like to show you a different approach, which might help you learning about deduction.

Take a look at this maze and try to solve it.

It’s a kid puzzle, might take you a little bit of time but overall easy. How did you do it? Did you start from the beginning and work your way to the goal?

A lot of the maze puzzle was designed to give you different options to move forward from the starting points, while there is far less options if you work backwards.

Hence, when I was a kid, I was taught to go backwards, a little “beat the system”. And this concept can be applied to deduction as well.

Example: when you see water spots, do you know why it was that way? There are millions of possibilities that you can play in your head and you have to slowly do experiments one by one to come to a conclusion.

What if instead, one day you learn about the city A’s water has an abnormal amount of calcium, while the city B don’t.

And for some reason, your friend took out from his bag a set of glasses with water spot stains like this, what deduction that you can easily made?

While the example is not perfect, it is a demonstration of how useful paying attention, explain and reverse engineering common phenomenon around you can become.

In this website, you can go to Data to learn about some interesting science. Also, you should learn about the tags and search bar on the page because as time move forwards, searching for a specific article can be challenging.

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