Scenarios before Orientation Question?

[DavidS674]

I've always understood that you should be diagramming scenarios before you move onto the questions. By the same token, I understand you're supposed to compare the initial rules to the potential answers in the orientation problem, as opposed to the other way around. This seems to assume that you haven't diagramed scenarios yet. Should you hold off on diagramming scenarios until after the first orientation problem? If not, should you be eliminating choices based on the initial rules and deductions or the scenarios?

[Laura Damone]

Hi!

There are two conditions under which we recommend diagramming scenarios before tackling the questions:

1. It's a totally weird game and you need to put pencil to paper to get your bearings.

2. You can see that the game has to follow one of two (or three) distinct paths based on a rule that can only pan out two or three ways, and that starts a chain reaction. For example, if either F or G has to be first, there are two distinct paths: F1 and G1. If F1 would start a chain reaction, and G1 would start a different chain reaction, go ahead and diagram out each scenario. We call this "framing."

If you're not going to frame the game, and it's not so weird that it's throwing you for a loop, then hold off on diagramming any scenarios until the questions actually demand it. Most games can shake out so many different ways that you can't reliably count on your pre-question scenarios helping. Better to wait for the question to give you more information that helps you generate scenarios that directly pertain to the questions.

For the orientation question, let the rules be the driver and eliminate answers that violate rules. If you generated a few scenarios to get your bearings on a weird game, you can't actually use these to answer the orientation question because they aren't exhaustive. The correct answer might be some other option that you hadn't thought about yet, so you can't eliminate an answer just because it doesn't match the work you've already done.

If you framed a game, however, you can use your frames to eliminate answers because frames are, by nature, exhaustive. If either F or G must go first, nobody else can, so the game can only shake out in those two ways. The correct answer must be allowable in one of your two frames.

Hope this helps!