r/mensa • u/samcornwell • 3d ago
Smalltalk I built a puzzle game, and watching people struggle with the simplest levels has made me wonder what “good at problem solving” actually means
I joined Mensa when I was 11, and I've always been drawn to things like chess, puzzles and problem solving. Recently, through a fondness of the game when I was a child, and a bit of spare time, I built a Sokoban game called Boxxy, and one of the unexpected things I've found most interesting is watching how differently people cope with exactly the same problem.
If you've never played Sokoban, the rules are almost absurdly simple. You walk around a maze and push boxes onto targets. You can't pull them. That's essentially it. Boxxy is this, it's essentially based on Sokoban, a cult 1982 Japanse game. "Sokoban" translates to "warehouse keeper".
The more I've worked with it, the more I've started thinking of Sokoban a little like chess. Not because the games are particularly similar, but because both have an extremely small set of rules from which an enormous amount of complexity emerges.
I also think both have that strange quality where a position can look completely obvious to one person and almost impenetrable to another. How a 300 elo puzzle can baffle one, while a 2000 elo can be solved simply by another who recognises a pattern.
I've now made several level packs by hand, and creating them has made this much more apparent to me. Some levels that I consider extremely easy have surprisingly poor completion rates. I've seen puzzles where roughly half the people who start them don't finish them. For example this puzzle:
What's particularly interesting is that it doesn't always seem to correlate with whether somebody would normally describe themselves as "good at puzzles".
Some people appear to look several moves ahead almost automatically. Some seem very good at recognising that pushing a box into a particular square will make the entire puzzle impossible long before it actually happens. Others repeatedly make the locally obvious move and only discover the consequence afterwards.
There's also spatial memory, planning, restraint and perhaps something resembling the pattern recognition you get in chess. It has made me wonder what we're actually measuring when we say somebody is good at problem solving.
Is Sokoban ability likely to correlate strongly with general intelligence? Spatial reasoning? Working memory? Chess ability? Experience with similar puzzles? Or is there a fairly specific mental skill being exercised here that somebody can be unusually good or bad at regardless of conventional measures of intelligence?
I'd be especially interested to hear from people here who play chess or do a lot of formal puzzle solving.
One other thing I've become fairly evangelical about is keeping Boxxy pure. There are countless modern versions with switches, portals, different coloured boxes, special tiles and so on, but I increasingly think the original rules are perfect. In the same way that millions of chess variants exist but ordinary chess remains endlessly interesting, Sokoban doesn't really need anything added to it.
The part I've enjoyed most wasn't actually programming Boxxy. It was making the levels. I spent about as long creating the first 50 levels by hand as I did building the game itself. I've since made several more themed packs, all manually, and there's something rather satisfying about trying to make a puzzle not just difficult but elegant and visually pleasing.
If anyone wants to try the thing that prompted all this, it's boxxy.io. It's free and there's nothing to install.
But I'm much more interested in the question than promoting the game:
What do you think is actually happening cognitively when one person can immediately “see” the solution to a spatial puzzle that another intelligent person genuinely cannot?
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