On the other hand, this can give me a hint that I *know* this route is fruitless, and use that fact to help my search for evidence that this route will fail.

If you are demonstrating scientific ability, you should examine the question data. If you are demonstrating your ability to outsmart examiners, feel free to game the questions.

If you are trying to exercise whatever mental skill Hitori exercises, keep to the standard Hitori techniques. If you just want the answer, by all means look it up. If you are trying to exercise your brain generally, coming up with new ways to solve the puzzle are excellent; but if you render it trivial you need to move on.

Assuming there’s a solution to a Sudoku puzzle, and then guessing, is generally cheating. But writing a computer program to solve it is a valuable mental exercise.

Point is, these are all solutions, and in the end your definition of “solution” could be the minimum one or the maximum one, but the one that solves the problem being put with a minimum of implied assumptions is supposed to be “correct”. With known-plaintext, for example, you’re meta-gaming because you know some text which ideally you wouldn’t know. Different levels of “knowing” imply different levels of meta-gaming, and in fact the puzzle might even require a certain level of meta-gaming in order to be solved at all, but I think the definition of meta-gaming should be inclusive of all of these different levels.

But which definition should win? I like the definition which appeals to specific knowledge about other players. This information is not necessarily available to all players of the game and hence deserves to be treated with deserved suspicion.

ObSimpsons reference:

Lisa and Bart are playing rock, paper, scissors.
Lisa (voiceover): Poor predictable Bart - always picks rock.
Bart (voiceover): Good old rock - nothing beats that!

The other definition of metagaming is way too broad and wishywashy for my taste. For example, *all* non-trivial strategies “transcend” the prescribed ruleset, prettymuch by definition. Consequently this definition doesn’t distinguish between techniques that are ethically dubious and those than aren’t.

You are both right!

Sunny linked to Wikipedia’s Metagame entry, which uses a definition that, as Alastair points out, is inconsistent with my behaviour.

However, Wikipedia has a separate entry on Metagaming, which uses a different definition:

broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.

I think that is an appropriate term here.

In Julian’s example, who are the “others”? The puzzle maker?

I think Julian is more concerned about using the knowledge *that it is a puzzle* in order to solve the puzzle. He’s not using any specific knowledge about anyone else. Subtle difference.

On the other hand I think his Dad *is* metagaming.

Two comments from me, no good answers to the fundamental ethics question. It’s a hard one.

I’m reminded of the scene from one of the Star Trek movies where Kirk describes how he beat the unbeatable computer in his final test. Turns out he hacked into it and changed the rules. Now that really *is* cheating. He should have been expelled instead of getting a “commendation for original thinking” or whatever it was. Starfleet Academy are really letting their standards slip. Or they will be. Or something.

If you’re wrong about b1 being in the answer, you will presumably discover that fact when you work through the rest of the puzzle. But this is exactly equivalent to the guess-and-backtrack technique that so many puzzles require. The point being: if you don’t know that b1 is in the answer, then all you’re doing is guessing, which can’t be cheating prettymuch by definition.

I guess this doesn’t really answer your question though.

As for whether it’s cheating probably depends on exactly what you’re doing. There’s a bunch of games where you’re expected to metagame. There’s a host of problems where you’re given two choices, but in reality you’re meant to choose a third (because the two given are red herrings). You could claim this is “cheating”, because you’re picking a choice outside the two, but it’s the correct answer.

For other games, this is not the case, but not cheating means you’re just making it harder on yourself, or trying to solve a harder problem. You might get more out of that problem (if it’s worth solving) but if the goal is just the solution then it doesn’t matter how you win.