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

[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.