Sudoku and my PhD thesis

 Recently I had an epiphany about Sudoku. 

As a novice or even a competent player,  I used to focus on individual cells.  If a cell can have 9 different possibilities for its identity at the beginning of the game,  the challenge is to reduce the number of possibilities for each cell to exactly 1 (ideal), 2(solvable), 3 and above (may not be useful). 

The whole reasoning is deductive and reductive- bringing down the number of possibilities through logic. This works well for Easy or Moderate levels. But in advanced Sudoku puzzles mere deductive logic does not enable you to solve the puzzle. For these, you can get up to a certain point with deductive logic, but then, will get stuck. This is the time when you have to zoom out. You can no longer focus on individual cells, but the puzzle as a whole.

This is where the tricks of the Phistomefel ring and Y/X wings come into play. The only way one can even think about using them is when one takes a whole-puzzle approach, inductive approach of building up based on the deduced possibilities. The switch in thinking has to happen at a particular time from deductive to inducive logic.

I realized that this was my failing in my PhD thesis and really, in understanding the field of Immunology as a whole. I could never understand why cellular biochemistry when algorithm-ed in neat flow charts didn't actually work the way you expect them to work in real life, when you have live cell cultures, live infections and a mixed population of cells. There is a deductive logic that one needed to use to minimize the possibilities of the biochemical reactions and reduce that to 1 process with multiple components. Then we have to realize that just because CD8 T cells play a particular known role does not mean that that would be the only role they would play in real life, with evolving parameters and variable interactions with other cells- for predicting how such a cell would respond to such diverse stimuli, an inductive logic is needed.

Inductive logic is not typically taught to Immunologists or indeed, biomedical trainee scientists or graduate students. But this switch between deductive and inductive was probably what was missing in my PhD years and why I struggled to make consistent sense of the information the world was throwing at me.