Reflecting on Challenges

  After doing so many challenges from pwn.college and picoCTF, I’ve had some thoughts about the enjoyment of puzzles. This is certainly a great oversimplifications, but there are the types of people that just like having the solution and don’t care much for the puzzle. Whether it’s out of a lack of tolerance for frustration or lack of patience or just preference for the rush of coming upon the solution, there are some people who just want to complete the task.

  Then there are people who like the actual process - they like the frustration of having to work through a challenge knowing that a solution is there, but currently out of their grasp. Finishing the puzzle is great, but it’s the process that they prefer, rather than the completion of the task. While I don’t think one is better than the other, I can see an argument being made that the solution-focused folks are more about the utility or maybe the competition/rewards from completing the puzzle, while process-focused folks are more about the enjoyment of the struggle itself.

  Once you know the solution to a problem, solving it becomes trivial no matter how difficult it initially is or how complex the required skills are (assuming you can actually perform those skills). From a learning perspective, practicing wading through the struggle over and over again greatly increases the tolerance for the frustration found in the process even if a solution-focused and a process-focused person each “have learned” the same information at the end of it all; and there will likely be times that there are situations where we cannot simply look up the answer - we must struggle to arrive at a solution. Without the tolerance to sit in that state of struggle for long enough, we may give up too early.

  A lot of these thoughts aren’t fully formed yet. It just struck me that one could ‘recite’ the answers to all of the problems and even remember how to use the tools in novel ways and in concert when confronting new challenges, but there would still be some key thing missing that the person who really entrenched themselves in the process - who enjoyed the process - would have. Whether that thing is valuable or not is up for debate, but my instincts are that that earned perseverence is critical.