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Comment by jeffcoat | Hacker News Reader

  > Write down the problem.
  > Think real hard.
  > Write down the solution.

I had a college physics professor who called this "The Method of Applied Brilliance".

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Here's how I did my hardest take home exams in grad school:

    - Attempt to solve problem using tools learned in the course
    - Attempt to solve problem using "standard" tools
    - Fail at the above
    - Go to bed
    - Wake up, shower, eat breakfast

I'd have the answers in the last step.

For this reason, take home exams are evil. Also, get rid of the fourth strategy

I think the fourth is crucial.

After a point, but I think a large part of getting a problem is committing maximal time and energy to solving it or "dying"

Taking your (conscious) mind off a full day's work allows your subconscious to process it, let your conclusions "sink in". That's why people often have the solutions in our sleep.

I don't think I've ever solved a difficult problem while actually focusing on the problem.

There's research on intuition and the unconscious mind to back this up. Apparently, for a lot of problems the best way to solve it is by thinking very hard about it and then letting it go. Your unconscious mind will go on, especially when you're doing activities such as showering (which has little distractions), and all of a sudden you will have the solution.

I use this technique all the time, if I can't think of a solution for a hard problem I'll just leave it and go for a run, take a shower or work an another problem.

Unfortunately, I only have read a book from the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, which is unfortunately in Dutch, but I'm sure there are people here who will have some references in English.

The cool thing is that it's not even as facetious as it appears. "Writing down the problem" is a legitimate, and very useful, tool for problem solving, and one that is often skipped.

Another useful step is "Ask a friend for help." Not because they'll solve it, but because the act of reducing the problem to a complexity simple enough to be explained to another person often makes the solution obvious.

On the other end, writing down the solution, is also a good tool. The number of times I thought I 'figured something out' by thinking real hard (in the shower or whatever) only to find problems during this final stage is large. It is very much the same thing as telling a fellow developer about a bug you can't solve, only to solve a trivial issue half way thru the explanation. The writing down or explanatory phase is quite important.

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