Systematizing

[unixronin]

This post by ehintz got me thinking again about systematizing behaviors.  I have several that I'm immediately aware of off the top of my head:

1. When I'm in an environment with a lot of similar or identical objects (slats in a window blind, glasses in a cupboard, folds in a curtain, boards on a floor) I'll often go over and over them figuring out all the possible non-trivial ways to divide them into a repeating series of constant or alternating groups.  For example, a vertical blind with 29 slats can't be divided evenly, 29 being prime, but can be divided in the following "interesting" ways (among others):
• 1,6,1,6,1,6,1,6,1
• 1,2,4,1,2,4,1,2,4,1,2,4,1
• 1,3,1,3,1,3,1,3,1,3,1,3,1,3,1
• 1,3,7,3,1,3,7,3,1
• 4,1,4,1,4,1,4,1,4,1,4
• 9,1,9,1,9
• 7,4,7,4,7
• 5,7,5,7,5
• 2,5,2,1,2,5,2,1,2,5,2
• 1,13,1,13,1
• 3,10,3,10,3 (or 3,5,5,3,5,5,3)
2. If there's several possible logical ways to organize a collection of objects (or sort a list....  I've re-sorted this three times already), I sometimes have extreme difficulty deciding which way to organize them, and may abandon a particular scheme and start over several times before I finally settle on one.  (This is obviously related to the one above.)
3. Possibly systematizing:  If I'm playing a video game, and something that I do technically succeeds but doesn't go quite the way I intended it to (for instance, I achieve an objective, but get hit more or lose more units in the process than I think I should have), I may reload and replay that action over and over and over until I get it acceptably close to perfect.

Do you have any systematizing behaviors that you're aware of?

Comments

Yes, DearHeart

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Yup. Sounds like me.

1. Except that I just count the objects instead of figuring out all the possible non-trivial ways to divide them into a repeating series of constant or alternating groups.

2. How many times did we go over and over how I wanted my yarn sorted? :-)

3. It depends on how hard it was. If it seems to me that it would be much harder to succeed the way I want to then I'll take the easy success, re: my Civ3 games, Space Race is generally what I consider an easy win and will try to put it off to achieve total domination or a points victory.

Re: Yes, DearHeart

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

re: my Civ3 games, Space Race is generally what I consider an easy win and will try to put it off to achieve total domination or a points victory.

/me nods

That's sort of like I always disable the other victory methods in SMAC and go for transcendance, because it's the coolest way to win.

[yndy.livejournal.com]

Male Brain? okay... well I come out that way on a lot of 'tests' for that sort of thing anyways...

Behaviors that fall under your category...

1) When in a doctor's office, dentist, hospital... someplace where waiting and looking at the ceiling go in common...
- if the ceiling is plasterboard, I must first figure out how many tiles complete the area - then, calculate the partial tiles into full ones - and figure out what the total would be, accounting for partial missing tiles due to configuration, and what the neatest polygonal shape is that that number of tiles will fit in
- if the ceiling has holes in the tiles
AND
-- they are regularly sized and spaced - must count all the holes in one tile or in approximately 1 sq. foot and then calculate the number of holes in the entirety of the area of the ceiling (best estimate based on years of gauging measurements for just this sort of thing)
OR
-- they are irregularly sized and spaced - must take a representative sample of space, usually about 6" x 6" and count them, then estimate the number of holes for the entire area.

2) When encountering repetative wallpaper patterns, must count individual elements to determine their frequency - so that if there is, say, a diamond pattern repeating on a friend's bathroom wall, must figure out how many diamonds there are in total in the bathroom, including partial diamonds combined to recreate wholes... this tends to freak my friends out when I tell them there are 173 diamonds in their bathroom wallpaper - unless you don't count the partials, and then there are only 160.

3) Can't eat things like M&M's, Skittles, Mike&Ike's without first seperating them into small piles of their constituent colors and being aware of how many their are of each, then eating them in a fashion so as to end up with equal numbers of each in a descending pattern, until there is only one of each color - then eat those according to preference, saving the best for last.

4) Obsessive about tracking palindromic numbers on the car's odometer - as well as those numbers which, when inverted are the same


That's a start anyways...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

3) Can't eat things like M&M's, Skittles, Mike&Ike's without first seperating them into small piles of their constituent colors and being aware of how many their are of each, then eating them in a fashion so as to end up with equal numbers of each in a descending pattern, until there is only one of each color - then eat those according to preference, saving the best for last.

Oh yeah, I used to do that all the time with M&Ms and Refreshers.

4) Obsessive about tracking palindromic numbers on the car's odometer - as well as those numbers which, when inverted are the same

I do that too .... I noted with great amusement that I was 4.9 miles across the NH border from VT when my car's odometer rolled over to 94949.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

2) When encountering repetative wallpaper patterns, must count individual elements to determine their frequency - so that if there is, say, a diamond pattern repeating on a friend's bathroom wall, must figure out how many diamonds there are in total in the bathroom, including partial diamonds combined to recreate wholes... this tends to freak my friends out when I tell them there are 173 diamonds in their bathroom wallpaper - unless you don't count the partials, and then there are only 160.

Hehe. I try to do the "Magic Eye" 3-D thing with repeating patterns.

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

I often score in or near the Aspy range on tests for it, but I think I just have some "typically male" brain attributes, together with high intelligence.

Those ceiling tiles with regular holes in them? I must mentally group the holes into squares, and then isosceles triangles, thus illustrating both square numbers and triagular numbers.

I count pieces of clothing as I fill the washing machine. Some individual pieces of clothing, of course, are worth 1.50 or even 2.00 pieces of lighter-weight clothing, whereas underpants are each worth 0.20 pieces of regular clothing. They clothing must be evenly distributed by total value in the four sectors of the wash-tub, and the total value of a load of wash must not exceed 14. (I thought I must be oddly obsessive-compulsive about this, until I saw my 19-year-old daughter counting and rearranging her clothes as she did laundry. I know she did not pick up the system from me, though, since she assigns different values to individual pieces of clothing, and limits each load to a value of 18.)

When I encounter a large number, I need to stop myself from mentally checking to see if it is evenly divisible by 49 -- otherwise I'd never have time to get any work done.