Reply to comment

A friend of mine is a former avid Sudoku player. I use the term former because while last summer she would play for about three hours a day, during the school year her time was often consumed with strictly academic assignments. I should also mention that this friend is also a math major. Well, last night this friend decided that she would resume playing Sudoku for the first time in quite a while. It was not anymore than three or four minutes into the game when she was proclaiming that she was having great difficulties completing the game. Her explanation for this was that she could not think quick enough since she had not used her brain in such a way since classes ended in May.  She then attempted to advise a strategy to complete the game.
As soon as I heard that she was devising a strategy, I stepped in to watch her play.  There were at least four boxes where it was obvious what number belonged so I asked her why she did not fill them in. She said it was because they did not coincide with her strategy and she would return to them once again after using the strategy that she devised to fill in some other boxes.
To be honest, it was painful to watch her play! I say this because as an outsider, I could see things that she could not. After conversing with Paul about this story, he suggested that perhaps it was the fact that her unconscious mind was impeding her from seeing the obvious. She had a certain strategy that she noticed in one part of the puzzle and her brain was automatically trying to use it to solve the rest of the puzzle in the same manner. On the other hand I was just an on-looker simply watching over her shoulder and not fully engaged in the game so it was quite simple for me to be able to look at the puzzle and realize what was obvious, or at least obvious to me. 

It is apparent when one plays games, their brains attempt to create a strategy based on past events that occurred and ended in a positive result. For example, perhaps this friend filled in a row with success and then unconsciously used this same method to fill in remaining portions of the puzzle.

I'm sure this idea will be explored further with our own findings over the course of the summer!