Connecting wall

[dr_whom]

Okay, listen. If you're ever on the British game show Only Connect, and you're trying to solve the Connecting Wall, and you see five items that you think all belong to the same category, and you start guessing subsets of four of them, keep track of which of the subsets you've guessed, and don't stop guessing until you've tried all five possibilities. I can't count how many times I've seen a team spot a connection on the board and start guessing subsets of four and then give up on it after trying three or four of the subsets, and then come back later and guess the same ones over again, and never complete the board for that reason. And then Victoria Coren says "You saw the connection, but every time you guessed a group you never tried leaving out 'Magnum'!" or whatever.

I'm just saying.

Comments

[lowellboyslash.livejournal.com]

STRONGLY AGREE. Also, it's almost always obvious which one you're supposed to leave out.

I can't get the wall to work! Wah! Do I need to be in America to do it?

[dr_whom]

It's working fine for me! Problem with Flash Player?

[qnmark.livejournal.com]

I'm in Sweden and it works for me.

[boojum42.livejournal.com]

OK, I did a few of the practice games, and a thing I'm noticing that may be relevant is:

There are some words where I'm really sure they belong to a category. (Like, yes, I'm confident a hermit crab is a kind of crab.)
Then, once I'm looking for other things in that category, there are various things where I'm like, maaaybe that's a kind of crab? I'm not sure?
It's psychologically hard to drop the name you're sure about in favor of names you're not sure about.

I guess what I'm saying is, I keep failing at following your advice even though your advice is obviously good, and I think that partially explains why I and others do that.

(But after flailing around inadequately on game walls 1-3 I totally aced game wall 4! OTOH I'm tempted to say that's because game wall 4 doesn't have enough distractors.)

[dr_whom]

Sure sure. I'm more thinking of ones where it's really clear which ones belong to a category, and one of them is just a red herring. Like, the board contains Kirk, Spock, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov, but unbeknownst to you "Spock" is just on there because he's part of a set of four child psychologists or something.

(Also I bet some of these are a lot easier to a British audience. I'm never going to solve the ones where one of the categories is cricket coaches or whatever.)