I thought today would be a good day to tidy up my problem proposal compilation, in preparation for June. Something I thought would be interesting to share is my current testsolve matrix:
How it works:
- Each row represents 1 original “problem idea” (this can refer to anything from a problem in contest to an idea that needs refinement1).
- Each column represents 1 person.
- Green cell means “person has seen problem idea”. To elaborate, this can mean any of the following:
- Person helped me solve the problem (so we are co-proposers).
- Person found an easier/alternative solution.
- Person solved it and gave some feedback.
- Person tried it, failed, and gave some feedback.
- Person made some passing comments (e.g. “looks bad”).
- Person saw it and decided there were better things to do (which is completely fine, because testsolving is a
form of charitynon-trivial time commitment with no incentives).
I may or may not update this, probably not.
- To quote Evan, “There is a big difference between having nothing and having something that “could” appear on a contest (and not too much of a grey area in between).” Basically each row is one of the “having something”s, though many of them need some refinement before I am satisfied. Some are quite lame and I may bin them eventually. ↩︎
Gabriel Goh Hao Xiang 
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