dog :3

Finally a genre I've done a ton of! In fact, out of the 11 puzzles on the database, 7 of them were set by me! Due to this experience, when I went to set one today, I went way over the difficulty mark I'm shooting for with this series. I'll still include that puzzle as a bonus, but the featured puzzle will be my second attempt.

Fun logic puzzle notation / history fact, the rules "no shaded cells are adjacent" and "all unshaded cells are connected" are considered the "dynasty" rules, named after Smullyanic Dynasty. OROD is a dynasty genre, and while this is the only dynasty genre covered in these 25 days, you may know other dynasty genres such as Heyawake, Yajisan-Kazusan, Hitori, Guide Arrow, Kurodoko, or many more.

You may hear me use this term in other ways, such as saying that Statue Park and Heyablock are dynasty-like, as they have the same rules, but applied to shaded groups instead of shaded cells. What I love about dynasty is that a lot of the experience in one genre will carry over to another, so you can skip to appreciating the deductions that make that genre unique.

Anyways,

Solving link

Review: I love OROD, but I kinda went through a phase of doing everything I wanted to with the genre. If something inspires me, I may revisit it, as I do enjoying setting/solving it, but I've already done a lot of the ideas that first came to mind when I first learned it.

Bonus puzzle!

The paradox of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it probably doesn’t exist, but those who know that it probably doesn’t exist don’t bring it up as often as those who are certain that it does, thereby proving that it does exist.

Authors Jansen, Rafferty, and Griffiths (2021) have done one of the better recent re-examinations of this now-tired meme, and I wish every person I saw on the Internet name-dropping Dunning-Kruger (DK) as a way of dunking on people they dislike would consider its conclusions seriously.

Conclusion 1: The vast majority of the effect attributed to DK is due to a statistical artifact called regression to the mean (RttM). Simply put, most tests of ability aren't great at measuring that ability, including our own internal self-assessments. When measurement error is applied to both of the scores obtained from your participants, then taking the difference between those scores gives you what looks like DK for free. Put another way, the famous skill-confidence disconnect is almost entirely consistent with nothing more than noisy measures of skill and of confidence. So, big-picture, DK as most people cite it does not exist, because it's a statistical mirage that Dunning and Kruger should have known better than to be fooled by. This is further exacerbated by the quartile maneuver D&K used in their original paper, if anyone's keeping score. Viewed in the cold light of day, the original paper's a bit of a statistical trainwreck.

Conclusion 2: Based on new data using a much larger sample of participants, this new trio of authors show an interesting wrinkle, depicted in my reproduction of their figure, above. On the one hand, their best estimate of the RttM effect mostly describes the data, but another model that incorporates an interaction with performance does a slightly better job. This suggests that, at least on average, people with the very highest and very lowest scores tend to be a tiny bit overconfident, whereas those with average-to-slightly-below-average scores actually tend to be slightly underconfident. Of course, across all these points, there's enormous individual variability.

Conclusion 3: Because confidence varies dramatically from person to person, this very small over-to-under-to-overconfident effect barely registers, and wouldn't help you very much in trying to predict someone's skill level from their confidence (or vice versa). Formally, the "effect size" of this underlying effect is quite small. As such, while there is now some evidence of a small (and more complicated) skill-confidence disconnect, that effect is so much smaller than how much people just vary in their confidence in general that it's probably best to proceed through life assuming that DK-like effects don't exist in a way that should impact your judgments of people.

I'm sure you've heard this one before. It goes something like this:

You are competing in a gameshow. Before you are three doors: behind one is a car, behind the other two are goats. You want the car (for some reason) and do not know where it is. The host asks you to guess which door the car is behind. After you make your guess, he opens one of the other two doors, revealing a goat, and offers this: you may have what is behind the other unopened door, or the one you chose originally. Which should you choose? Or more specifically: what is the probability that either option gives you of winning the car?