M2M Day 254: I’ve been bad
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For July, my goal is to solve a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting without any aid.
Almost one week ago, I built my Crossword Trainer, a computer program that helps me memorize past crossword clues and answers. After only briefly using the program and seeing encouraging results, I realized that the Crossword Trainer would play a major role in my practice regiment during this month.
With this enthusiasm, I spent the next few days intensely learning over 4,000 pairs of crossword clues and answers. As I learned more words, my crossword solving abilities noticeably improved. Everything was going great.
Then, three days ago, I attempted to quantify the exact benefits of memorizing all these words via the Crossword Trainer. The results were less encouraging than I hoped: Basically, most answers in any given new crossword puzzle wouldn’t be represented in my training set, so the Crossword Trainer was really only helping me get a general feel for clues and answer, and nothing more.
Still, getting this general feel is an important step, but it’s harder to quantify when I’ve reached a level of general feel where extra effort only offers diminishing marginal returns.
In the past few days, I’ve tried using my trainer during my commute, but consistently felt like I was wasting my time (i.e. that my general feel wasn’t improving in any noticeable way), and thus, I opted to just solve normal puzzles instead.
Interestingly, in the past few days, since I’ve stopped using the trainer, the variance in my solves has gone way up. On some puzzles, my performance is encouraging. On others, I can barely make a dent in the grid. My consistency has regressed in some fashion.
Also, today, I came across a few clues where I knew I had studied the answers previously during a Crossword Trainer session, but couldn’t actually remember what I had supposedly “memorized”. This was particular disheartening.
Clearly, the Crossword Trainer is important, even if I’m still not fully able to quantify or measure it’s benefits.
Tomorrow, I need to return to the Crossword Trainer with the seriousness that I had when I first started using it.
It’s time for me to stop slacking off…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
