- What type of problem is this?
- Have you ever seen anything alike? If yes, what kinds of things
worked there?
- Work out a few examples.
- Any guesses?
- Identify hypotheses.
- What kinds of strategies could you attempt? There's a
transaction cost in that each strategy takes time to evaluate fully. It's good
to decide early whether you want to even try.
- Brute force is meant not to work, it doesn't work often, and is
punished. Nevertheless, brute force sometimes works, but you have to be willing
to do it completely. If you do 99% of a brute force problem
you'll likely get at most 1 point out of 10.